



X. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 





BELIEFS ABOUT THE BIBLE 



BY 



M. J. SAVAGE 



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The Bible is the great family chronicle qftheJews.— 'R'EmE 



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BOSTON 
GEO. H. ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET 
1883 






Copyright, 1SS3, 
By GEORGE H. ELLIS. 



To 



HIM WHO WAS MY BOYHOOD'S IDEAL, AND TO WHOSE 

LATER CARE I OWE THE BEST OF WHAT I 

HAVE DONE OR BECOME,— 



TO 



MY BROTHER. 



PREFACE. 



We have just been celebrating the four hundredth 
anniversary of the birth of Martin Luther. The one 
thing with which his name is more prominently asso- 
ciated than with anything else is — for the Protestant 
world — the dethronement of the Pope as God's vice- 
gerent on earth, and the establishment of the Bible in 
his place. It is then a fitting time for us to raise the 
question as to whether this work of his can be regarded 
as a finality. More important than any discussion as 
to what system of doctrine or church polity the Bible 
may be interpreted into supporting, is the deeper 
inquiry as to how we are to regard the Bible itself. 
This book is an attempt to give a plain answer to that 
inquiry. 

Boston, November, 1883. 



CONTENTS. 



I. The English Bible, , s 9 

II. The Text and the Canon, 23 

III. The Pentateuch, 40 

IV. The Prophets, 

V. The Writings, 79 

VI. The Bridge between the Testaments, ... 96 

VII. The Epistles, 11 1 

VIII. The Gospels, 126 

IX. The Religion of the Bible, . . . 144 

X. The Morality of the Bible, 157 

XI. The Present Use and Worth of the Bible, . 175 

XII. The Eternal Bible, 190 



THE ENGLISH BIBLE. 



The Bible is the key point of the modern theological con- 
troversy. Whatever theory of its origin, its nature, its 
authority, shall win in this critical contest that is going on, 
will influence the thought and the progress of the religious 
world for all future time. 

What kind of a book is this ? Is it the word of God ? Is 
it infallible ? Is it inspired ? Is it ultimate authority con- 
cerning the nature of God, the nature of man, human duty 
and human destiny ? Is it a book unique, to be set apart in 
a class by itself ? Is it unlike all other productions that the 
world has ever seen ? These are the questions that need to 
be asked and that press for an answer. How important they 
are I need not waste words in impressing upon your minds. 
If this book be indeed in its entirety the word of God, if it 
be infallible, if its conceptions of the divine nature and 
human nature, of morality, religion, and the future be un- 
changing truth, then there is nothing so important as that 
we should know it, that we should believe it heartily, and 
that we should act upon it every day of our lives. 

On the other hand, if these claims be not true, then the 
claim itself is vicious, mischievous, and injurious to man. It 
stands in the way of human progress. For example, sup- 
pose a ship at sea : the captain has on board a chart which 
he believes to be perfectly accurate in every part. He has 



10 Beliefs about the Bible. 

a compass, the needle of which he believes to be always true 
to the north. If they be what he supposes, then they will 
of course help him \ and it is of the utmost importance to 
him that he should know it and believe it. But, if the chart 
be inaccurate, if the compass is not to be depended on, then 
to trust in them will certainly lead him astray, and maybe 
cause disaster and wreck. 

Now, then, if the Bible conception of God, the Bible teach- 
ing concerning his nature, be true, then it is very important 
that we should know it ; but if it be not, and we think it is, 
then in our religious conceptions we may be all astray. If 
the Bible teaching concerning human nature, the origin of 
man, the origin and the nature of sin, be false, and we be- 
lieve and act upon them as though they were true, then we 
are taking just that course which must stand in the way of 
an accurate solution of the problem. If the Bible doctrine 
as to the final destiny of the race be not true, and neverthe- 
less we bend all our energies, contribute our money, time, 
and effort in order to escape certain supposed dangers when 
those dangers do not really exist, we are not merely wasting 
time, money, and thought, but we are leading humanity 
by an entirely false road, and making it practically im- 
possible for us to find out the real truth concerning these 
all-important problems. He who believes that the Bible is 
the infallible word of God must of course hold to this faith 
as the highest of all virtues, the most important of all things 
in the world. If, then, it be not true, he is substituting a' 
false standard of right and wrong for the true one. If the 
Bible be infallible, the most important thing in the world is 
that we should believe it. If it be infallible, then to disbe- 
lieve it becomes a crime in our thought. The use of reason 
is turned into a danger. Doubt becomes a sin; while, if 
the Bible be not infallible, the highest duty of man is to 



The English Bible. II 

doubt it. The highest duty of man is to use his 
reason, is to find out what is the constitution of human 
nature, and on what its development and future pros- 
perity depend. I say then that to believe that the Bible is 
infallibly inspired, if it be not so, is not an innocent belief, a 
harmless faith. It is something that stands squarely in the 
way of human progress, more than anything else of which we 
can conceive. 

We need then earnestly, simply, without prejudice and 
without passion, to ask and answer these grave questions in 
the light of all the knowledge and help that we can obtain. 
In regard to my own attitude toward it, I wish to say to 
you that I have no prejudice against a revelation. My heart 
on the contrary would bound and leap with joy to meet 
and welcome a revelation, could I believe that it were true. 
Could I believe that God did speak in this marvellous way, 
with what eagerness would I listen to catch the faintest 
utterance ! Did I believe that some supernatural light might 
be shed down upon our human pathway which should bring 
the solution of our human problems, over which brain be- 
comes weary and hearts ache, with what gladness would I 
look for the faintest glimmer of a ray of that divine light and 
guidance ! Whatever, then, I shall say in the course of 
these discussions, I beg you not to think that I am influ- 
enced in the slightest degree by any antagonism toward the 
revelation idea itself. But by as much as I desire light, by 
precisely so much am I anxious not to be deceived. 

Let us then, with these preliminary ideas, take up the book 
and look at it, and see what it is. 

We find that it is called "the Bible," "the book"; and yet, 
as we trace its history a little, we discover that this title is a 
very modern one. It is only within recent centuries that 
it has gone by this name, " the book," in the singular number. 



12 Beliefs about the Bible, 

It was called long before that, in the Greek, Ta Biblia, " the 
books," indicating by this title what at least is the apparent 
truth, — that it is not one book, but a little library brought 
together and made one by being put within the same limiting 
covers. Before it was called "the books/' it was called "the 
scriptures," or "writings." But although the Old Testament 
went by this title, which indicated that they were set apart by 
themselves, it was long before the same descriptive and 
sacred title was applied to the New Testament. 

Leaving the title and opening the book, what do we find ? 
If it be a Catholic copy or many of the older Protestant 
copies, we shall find three grand divisions, the Old Testa- 
ment or covenant, the Apocrypha, and the New Testament 
or covenant ; the word " covenant " probably representing 
more accurately the idea of the original word than does 
the word " testament." We will leave out of consideration 
the Apocrypha, because the Protestants have always rejected 
it, although the Catholics have accepted it as of equal au- 
thority with the other two divisions. 

We find it not only divided into two divisions, but that 
there are many books, thirty-nine in the Old Testament, 
and twenty-seven in the New, making a library of sixty-six 
little volumes in all. Let us run over the contents for a 
moment, that we may get the scope of this work. 

At the beginning, we find the Pentateuch, commonly re- 
garded as the five books of Moses. They tell us about the 
creation of the world, the origin and distribution of nations, 
the emigrations of the early peoples, until at last God is 
represented as selecting one and constituting it his own 
peculiar people. We trace this people from its wanderings 
from the far East through Palestine, until we find them 
slaves in Egypt. Then, we find them escaping from under 
the bondage of the Egyptian kings into the wilderness, where 



The English Bible. 13 

they are supposed to have wandered forty years. During 
this time, the statutes of God are given them through the 
agency of Moses. Then come Joshua and Judges, books 
which tell the story and the conquest of Canaan, stories of 
the heroes and the wars of the separate tribes before they 
were compacted under one law into one kingdom. Then, at 
the end of this, we find a beautiful little poetic idyl, the story 
of Ruth, her faithfulness and love. Next follows the history 
of the kings, the various dynasties, the wars of the two king- 
doms of Judah and Israel between themselves and between 
them and the surrounding nations. These are related to us 
in the Books of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles. Then, we 
have the story, in Ezra and Nehemiah, of the' captivity of 
the people in Babylon, their return, and the rebuilding of 
their beloved temple. Next comes the story of Esther, and 
the founding of one of the great festivals of the Jews ; the 
attempt of their persecutors to destroy them, and the re- 
venge wrought on them by the permission of the king. 
Now, we find ourselves face to face with Job and that old- 
est problem of the world, a problem not yet solved, of 
human suffering, and how it may be reconciled with justice 
in the government of the world. Passing from that, we find 
that we have in our hands the hymn-book of the Jews, that 
which they used in their temple service, called the Psalms 
of David. Then come the Proverbs, a collection of wise 
sayings popularly attributed to Solomon. Next, the little 
Book of Ecclesiastes, one of the darkest, most hopeless, 
most pessimistic works that the religious or literary world 
has produced, setting forth the vanity of human life, the 
emptiness of all things under the sun. Then comes a beau- 
tiful Eastern love-poem, misunderstood, perverted, ridiculed, 
and yet containing one of the most beautiful lessons in all 
Scripture, the Song of Solomon. Next, we are in the pres- 



14 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ence of the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, followed by what 
was supposed to be Jeremiah's lament over the desolation 
of his people. Then come Ezekiel, Daniel, and the twelve 
minor prophets. When we come to the New Testament, we 
find the Four Gospels, — you will see later why there are 
four now, originally there were many more,— supposed to be 
written by the men whose names they bear ; the first three 
very much alike in their general characteristics, the last one 
standing apart and constituting a class by itself. The Acts 
then tell us about the history of the founding of the early 
Christian Church. Then there are fourteen letters supposed 
to have been written by Paul to these churches, answering 
their questions, solving their problems, telling how to order 
and regulate their affairs, advising with reference to matters 
of doctrine and practice. Next comes a general Epistle by 
James to all the churches ; then two bearing the name of 
Peter, three bearing the name of John, and one little one 
bearing the name of Jude. Lastly comes the Apocalypse, 
the Revelation of St. John, wherein is set forth in gorgeous 
strain his lofty vision of the supposed course of human his- 
tory, until the second coming of Christ and the revelation of 
the city of God coming down out of heaven. 

This is the book of which we are to treat in its varied 
contents. It claims to cover everything from the creation 
of the world unto the end of all mundane things, — the fold- 
ing away of the heavens like a scroll, and the entering in 
of that existence, when, in the words of the angel, "time 
shall be no more." 

Where did this book come from ? So far as we are to 
consider the question to-day, it is a translation. I shall not 
be able to cover more ground this morning than the treat- 
ment of the English Bible. We have then a translation 
from certain Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. This which 



The English Bible. 15 

we call the received text to-day was not the first of the 
translations. It is the last of the series, beginning with the 
work of Tyndale, Coverdale, and their compeers, followed 
by the Geneva, the Douay, the Bishops' Bible, and others, 
until at last, under the patronage of James I. of England, 
in 161 1, two hundred and seventy-one years ago, the book 
as we have it was published. 

I want to call your attention to two or three peculiarities 
of our English version before we go on to the theories 
which are held concerning it. You will find, as you open it, 
that it is divided not only into books, but these books are 
cut up into chapters and verses. Are these chapters and 
verses any part of the original ? Not at all. We need to 
bear this in mind, because it is a matter of a good deal of 
practical importance sometimes. The divisions of chapters 
and verses were simply the work of the publisher, made for 
mere convenience of reference ; and, sometimes, they are so 
badly made that they interfere very seriously with the 
apprehension of the meaning of the original writers. 

For example, it is quite commonly the case that the 
paragraph or section is divided in such a way that, in read- 
ing one chapter, you may begin in the middle of one subject 
and leave off in the middle of another, thus getting no idea 
of the matter as it lay in the mind of the writer. The verse 
division is also purely arbitrary, hardly any more accurate 
than as though they were divided into sections of half an 
inch in length without any regard to their meaning. I have 
seen many a time on the walls of public halls and churches 
isolated texts hung up as mottoes, which not only do not 
convey the idea of the original writer, but often quite the 
opposite. As one concrete example, — I speak of it without 
expressing any convictions I may have in connection with 
temperance, — I have seen in halls the motto, "Touch not, 



1 6 Beliefs about the Bible. 

taste not, handle not," as though God, by the mouth of 
Paul, had issued that as a divine injunction. If, however, 
you take the trouble to look into Paul's own writings, you 
will find that he simply quotes, "Why are ye subject to 
ordinances (touch not, taste not, handle not, which all are 
to perish with the using) ? " to condemn them. That is, Paul 
says precisely the opposite of what he is made to say in 
this purely arbitrary use of the text detached from its 
surroundings. 

Not only this, but you find also along the headings of the 
pages and at the beginning of chapters certain running titles 
and comments, indicating what, according to the author of 
these titles, is contained in the pages and chapters so 
marked. Was this any part of the original? No. This, 
again, was the work of the publishers ; and, many a time, these 
headings are not only fanciful and imaginary, but grossly in- 
correct. That is, they are really a process of interpreting 
Scripture, turning headings and indexes into commentaries; 
and, as I have said, they are grossly incorrect. 

Let us remember then, as we handle the Bible, that the 
original writers are not responsible for these headings, any 
more than they are responsible for the divisions into chapters 
and verses. 

One other idea must be borne in mind in this connection. 
Let us grant for a moment that the original Hebrew and 
Greek manuscripts are the infallible word of God. Never- 
theless, as we open our English Bible, we cannot feel that we 
have in our hands a verbal transcript of this infallible work, 
because no one claims that the translators were inspired. 
We have only their judgment as to what the original writers 
meant, put into the best English of which they had any prac- 
tical control. So that, whatever the original may be, the 
translation is not infallible, but is the result of the judgment 



The English Bible. \*J 

of fallible men ; and this is emphasized by the fact that no 
two translations are alike, and that, even in this revised ver- 
sion of the New Testament which we have received within a 
year or two, there are a vast number of places where the 
English and American scholars differed very seriously as to 
the meaning of certain words and phrases. These differ- 
ences are so important that an appendix has been added, 
containing them. If you take up an American edition, you 
will find the opinions of the English revisers as to these 
points given in an appendix by themselves ; and, if you take 
up an English copy, you will find the American revisers' 
opinions given in an appendix by themselves. We must 
therefore bear in mind that there may be an important differ- 
ence between the Bible as first written and the Bible as 
translated, whatever theory of the original may be held. 

Now, then, let me place before you, as clearly as I can, 
some of the different theories concerning this great book 
that have been held by the religious world in our Protestant 
age. 

The first one is that which has gone by the name of verbal 
inspiration. Those who held to this theory — and there are 
some still who hold to it to-day, I suppose — believed that 
every word as it appeared in the original Greek and Hebrew 
manuscripts was directly and definitely inspired by God ; so 
that it was as literally God's word as though he had himself 
held the pen, and had chosen those words and no other. 
This theory was carried so far by the early Puritan divines 
that some actually believed that not only the words, but the 
punctuation points, were inspired. This seems something 
trivia] to us ; and yet, if you look at it a little, you will see 
that it is an essential part of the theory. You know how 
possible it is to change the sense of a passage in a letter or 
a book by changing the position of a comma, a semicolon, 



1 8 Beliefs about the Bible. 

or a period. Only a little while ago, I saw a famous letter of 
Mr. Darwin's, over which there has been much controversy 
as to whether he said a certain thing or whether he said 
something else, the whole depending on where you put the 
punctuation mark. It is evident, therefore, that the location 
of a comma is not a light thing./ Indeed, it seems to me as 
important that the punctuation should have been inspired as 
the words ; and yet I may have occasion, as I go on, to show 
you how absurd any such conception as this must be, be- 
cause the original manuscripts, many of them, from which 
our version is taken, contained not only no punctuation, but 
no division into chapters or even paragraphs. They simply 
present to the reader one solid page, with no division into 
words even, and many times with only an abbreviation rep- 
resenting a word. Whatever, then, may be true of the trans- 
lation, there were no punctuation marks in the originals as 
we have them ; and consequently, if they were definitely and 
infallibly inspired, it must have been through the medium 
of the human copyist or the printer. This is the first theory. 

The next, which has been the one more commonly held 
in the Protestant world, and the one generally held by those 
who call themselves strictly evangelical, is plenary inspira- 
tion, from a Latin word meaning full or complete. While 
they would not stickle for the very words or punctuation 
marks, they held and taught, and still hold and teach, that 
the human writers of the original manuscripts of the Bible 
were so divinely controlled as to preclude them from • the 
possibility of any mistake, so that the Bible in every part 
is completely true without any mixture of error. This is 
the theory of plenary inspiration. 

There is another theory which is coming to be quite 
popular, especially among the younger men in the ministry, 
those who are glad to call themselves by the name of liberal 



The English Bible. 19 

orthodox. It is the theory which teaches that, though the 
Bible may be in error in regard to scientific matters, though 
it may make mistakes as to historical facts, though it may 
be wrong in its figures and chronology, still it is true 
and the infallible word of God, so far as concerns its moral 
and religious teaching. That is, it may make mistakes in 
geology, in geography and chronology and history, but that, 
whenever it comes to teaching anything about human destiny, 
then it is infallible. That always seemed to me a strange 
conglomerate of a theory. Undoubtedly, it has resulted 
from the pressure that has been brought to bear upon the 
modern world along these lines of science and history and 
chronology, a pressure so severe as to have broken down 
at these points the whole theory of plenary inspiration. 
That is, these men have been compelled to admit that Biblical 
science was wrong, that the writers were mistaken in history, 
that they blundered in chronology • yet, falling back from 
this, they have taken refuge in the citadel of the unknown 
and unknowable. They insist on claiming that these 
writers are infallible here ; and they can keep on doing this, 
so far as I can see, as long as they please, because nobody 
knows enough about this matter to contradict them. They 
can claim that the Bible is infallible, when it teaches us 
about the innermost nature of God, the future world, the 
need of forgiveness, because we cannot bring these partic- 
ular questions to any practical test. This theory, then, is 
one that holds that the Bible is infallible and inspired only in 
those parts where it is practically impossible to bring it to 
any decisive test. 

But there is still another one which has been popular 
among the old Unitarians, and is held by a great many of 
them to-day. That is, they would not put their finger upon 
each particular thing in the Bible, and say that this is infalli- 



20 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ble, absolute, and unchanging truth, while this other is error. 
They do not say that the Bible is the word of God ; but they 
change the phrase, and say that it contains the word of God, 
although they give no rule for telling what is the infallible 
word of God and what is the human addition or misconcep- 
tion. I could never find any standard by which they pro- 
posed to bring this matter to the test, except the standard of 
individual intuition and taste. As though a man should say, 
"That part which I like, which strikes me as reasonable, 
which I am inclined to believe, which is practically helpful 
to me, I take as the infallible word of God and reject the 
rest." But let them dare to apply this test, and they have 
a different Bible for each person, each making his own selec- 
tion among the different parts. 

There is one more theory, still more attenuated than this. 
You see how they have gradually diminished and faded 
away, until at last the conception of the writers is something 
so nearly invisible as to need a microscope to get a good 
view of it. This theory is that, although the Bible is not 
the word of God in any general sense, though it does not 
contain the word of God in any special sense, yet that some- 
way it is a different book from all others in the world, hav- 
ing a quality of inspiration about it that is unique, that sets 
it apart. They would feel a little shocked and troubled if 
you should place the Bible on the same level with Shak- 
spere or Goethe, if you should propose to criticise it under 
precisely the same methods, if you should treat it simply as 
a human production. 

There is yet another theory ; and that is the one which 
treats the Bible as a purely human production, like any 
other natural, human work. Heine, the great German poet, 
gave an accurate and adequate expression to this idea, when 
he said — he being a Jew by parentage — that the Bible was 



The English Bible, 21 



*a 



simply " the great family chronicle of the Jews." This theory 
treats the book as a great body of religious and ethical 
literature, as the spiritual biography of a nation, the produc- 
of a thousand years of hope and fear, and struggle and 
aspiration, and yet a perfectly natural human production, 
springing out of the human heart and human life just as 
naturally as any other part of the world's great literature. 
This is what Emerson gave utterance to in the famous 
couplet of his famous poem, "The Problem," — 

" Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old." 

There is one more thought which is the extreme antipode, 
so to speak, of the extreme inspirational and infallible theory, 
— a theory held and taught with a great deal of vigor by cer- 
tain rough iconoclasts of the time, and not only by those, 
but by some of the leading scholars of the world. This is, 
that the Bible is so false in its conceptions of God, so un- 
founded in its teachings concerning human nature, so one- 
sided in its ethical ideas and precepts, so barbaric in a 
large part of its Old Testament stories, so mystic and 
unreal in a large part of the New, that it is a positive evil 
to have the book commonly in the hands of the people, 
looked on with the reverence and awe with which it is com- 
monly regarded. James Anthony Froude, the great English 
historian, says — I quote only his idea from memory — that, 
when he looks over the history of the last thousand years, and 
sees the unspeakable amount of evil that has been wrought 
in Christendom as the result of believing that the Bible was 
the inspired word of God, he could not help feeling that, 
having it in all homes, regarded as it was, the book was 
working an incalculable amount of injury. He would regard 
it, therefore, as a production not to be commonly spread and 



22 Beliefs about the Bible, 

commonly used in the shape in which it is held at the pres- 
ent time. A concession to a part of this theory was made 
recently by Dr. R. Heber Newton, a brilliant Episcopal min- 
ister, who is reported in the New York Herald to have said 
that the Bible, in its entirety, ought not to be publicly circu- 
lated, that there should be at least a selected or expurgated 
edition published before it is spread broadcast over the world. 
These, then, are the different theories concerning this book, 
of which I have given you this general account. It is not 
my purpose to pursue the subject further to-day. As to what 
we are to think of it, how it originated, who wrote it, when, 
where, what influence it has had on the world, and what 
influences we may expect it to have still, — these questions 
will be the subject of future discourses. 



THE TEXT AND THE CANON. 



A lady present in my audience last Sunday morning 
(I hope she was not one of my regular hearers, because I 
should be sorry to be so misunderstood and misinterpreted 
by one hearing me constantly) was overheard to remark 
that she did not see any use in Mr. Savage's attacking the 
Bible, a book that had done so much good in the world, 
whatever the truth about it might be. This may represent 
the attitude of more than one ; and, for this reason, I wish 
to make one or two remarks concerning it. 

In the first place, I am only telling the simple truth about 
the Bible ; and it seems to me a most damaging admission 
for any one to make concerning a man, an institution, or a 
book, that telling the truth about him or it is attacking it. 
In the next place, we need to draw a very clear-cut line, or 
distinction, between the Bible and the theories that have 
been held or taught concerning it. If you will notice, I 
think you will bear me witness that I have never attacked 
the Bible ; and it is not my purpose to do so in this course of 
sermons. I only attack what I regard as certain false, un- 
founded, vicious theories involved in the claims put forth on 
its behalf, which it has never put forth, and has never at- 
tempted to sustain. In the third place, we need to remem- 
ber that theories and beliefs concerning God, concerning 
Bibles, concerning institutions of one kind or another, may 
have been really helpful to man in some stage of his prog- 
ress ; and yet these same beliefs and theories may afterward 



24 Biliefs about the Bible. 

come to be hindrances that stand in the way of his further 
advance. So much by way of comment on this type of 
criticism. 

Last Sunday morning, I treated of the English Bible, its 
contents, its divisions, natural and artificial, and the theories 
that have been held in the past, and are now currently held 
concerning it. In so doing, I took note of the well-known 
fact that this English Bible of ours is a translation from an 
earlier literature ; and I called your attention to this some- 
what important point, that, even though the originals of the 
Old and New Testaments may have been infallible and in- 
spired, we cannot claim that we have now a book which is thus 
infallible and inspired, unless we know that the translators 
were divinely assisted in their work ; and this no man that I 
have heard of has ever put forth as a sober claim. But, 
even though we knew that the Old and New Testament 
manuscripts were originally infallible and inspired, we should 
not be sure that those copies that the translators used pos- 
sessed these characteristics, unless we could be certain that 
we have in our present copies just those books, and no more, 
that were in the first place rendered infallible, and unless 
we could be perfectly sure that they had come down to us 
through the ages unchanged in every essential feature. But, 
again, though we knew that the manuscripts of the Old and 
New Testaments had never been changed, though we could 
be sure that the translators had a copy that had never 
been varied by a phrase or a sentence or a word or a letter, 
we should not then be certain that the book was infallible 
and inspired. We should need to go back and find out 
where this original came from, and what credentials it 
brought with it when it came. That is further back than we 
shall be able to go this morning, and I shall confine myself 
to considering the text and the canon. 



The Text and the Canon. 25 

As we go one step back of our English Bible, what do we 
find ? Do we find some one copy containing just the books 
of our present Bible, no more, no less ? Do we find that 
this Bible has been transmitted from generation to genera- 
tion without any changes or any mistakes ? Instead of 
that, we find the truth to be almost as far the other way as 
you can conceive or imagine. As there are some special 
points that I wish to bring before you concerning the manu- 
scripts of the Old Testament, I shall treat first of those of 
the New. 

We have in the world a collection, not in any one place, 
but in all, of somewhere in the neighborhood of seventeen 
hundred New Testament manuscripts. Sometimes a manu- 
script is complete, containing all the books, sometimes con- 
taining certain books not at present admitted. In other 
cases, the manuscript covers only a fragment or one book or 
even a part of a book. Are these all alike ? Does there 
seem to have been any supernatural supervision exercised 
in making these copies, to keep out any error or mistake ? 
Does there seem to have been even ordinary human care 
exercised to prevent the intrusion of any errors ? You can 
judge for yourself, when I tell you that, within the range of 
these seventeen hundred manuscripts, there are somewhere 
in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty thousand vari- 
ous readings. It is only just to say, of course, that the 
larger part of these variations are minute, not touching mat- 
ters of great importance, sometimes only a difference in the 
spelling of a word, sometimes a difference in the word itself, 
sometimes a difference in a phrase ; but some of them are 
important enough to extend to even whole paragraphs and 
parts of chapters, so that many of these variations are very 
important indeed. 

Prof. George P. Fisher, of Yale Theological Seminary, 



26 Beliefs about the Bible. 

one of the leading orthodox scholars, in an article published 
last summer in the North American Review, touching this 
matter of the various readings in the manuscripts, has sought 
to avoid the force of this very important point by saying that 
these manuscripts are probably nearly, if not quite, as 
accurate as those we have of Plato, of Aristotle, or of the 
Commentaries of Caesar; that we do not feel any special 
doubt as to the teachings of Plato or Aristotle or Caesar on 
account of the variations in manuscripts, and we ought not 
any more to feel anxiety or trouble about the New Testament 
variations. But there is a very marked distinction between 
the two cases, and one that an acute scholar like Prof. 
Fisher certainly ought not to have overlooked. No one 
claims that your life and mine for this world, much less our 
eternal destiny for heaven or hell in the next world, depends 
on the accuracy of a reading in Plato or Aristotle or Caesar's 
Commentaries. If some great Church should turn one of 
these books into its Bible, and make human destiny hinge 
on the accuracy of the phrases of Plato or Aristotle, you 
would then see that the world would rouse and wake up 
in its interest as to whether we could be certain that these 
readings had come down uncorrupted from the past. There 
is no justice then in making any such comparison as this. 
The point we wish to know is whether we can be so certain 
as to the phrases, the wording, the literal teaching of this 
book, called the New Testament, that any body of men 
has a right to build a world-wide doctrine, and make- the 
eternal peace or the misery of men depend on the reading 
of a text. 

It is thus a question of very great importance for us to 
find out whether a book, on whose behalf such extraordinary 
claims are made, has come down to us accurately as it was 
written by its authors. I have said, however, that there 



The Text and the Canon. 27 

are some one hundred and fifty thousand different readings 
in its manuscripts. How can we account for them ? Under 
what influences have they come to exist ? Under the most 
natural ones in the world. If we consider the New Testa- 
ment as simply a human production, it is not strange that 
we should have these different readings, changes of texts, 
misunderstandings, misinterpretations. Every scholar knows 
that, concerning Shakspere for example, there are thousands 
and thousands of different readings, over which the critics 
speculate and study. But it does not arouse any general 
interest in the world, because it is of no practical importance 
to man whether Shakspere used this particular word in this 
particular place or that. No question of human destiny 
hinges on it. It is merely a matter of literary curiosity. 

These changes then have come about in the most natural 
way. In the first place, through the blunders of copyists. 
You are aware that printing is quite a modern invention ; and 
that these manuscripts were written by hand, by the monks 
and students of the Middle Ages, and in the early ages of 
Christianity. If you have had a letter copied by the hands 
of a clerk, or if you have ever attempted to do any copying 
yourself, you know how easy it is to leave out or misspell a 
word or to substitute a wrong one or to make any one of a 
dozen common errors in copying a piece of work. Here is 
the source of a great many of them. Another rises from 
the fact that it was quite a common thing for the various 
makers of manuscripts to write in the margin of the book, or 
at the foot of the page, various little notes and comments ; 
to suggest one word for another where they thought some 
previous copyist might have made a mistake. When a new 
copy was to be made, the man who was engaged in doing it 
would wonder a great many times whether these notes in the 
margin ought to be a part of the text, something that the 



28 Beliefs about the Bible. 

previous copyist had left out ; and, thinking they ought, he 
would incorporate them into the text itself. A great many 
changes, doubtless, came about in this way. If you remem- 
ber that these Greek manuscripts generally were not divided 
into verses and paragraphs, but that they were written solid, 
you will see how easy it was for errors of one kind or an- 
other to spring up in this way. If, for example, I should 
send you a manuscript to-day without any division of para- 
graphs, sentences, or even of words, as some are written, all 
the letters about the same distance apart, and the whole 
page solid, the chances would be a hundred to one against 
your making me an accurate copy, putting in the punctuation 
where I intended it to be, dividing the sentences into words 
as I had them in my mind, and so giving an accurate tran- 
script of the whole. 

There is another source of error still that has sprung out 
of the doctrinal bias of the copyist himself. Deliberate lib- 
erties were taken a great many times by the copyist, in im- 
proving the text, as he supposed, leaving out a word that he 
did not like, or inserting one that he did. As in that great 
warfare that waged in the early Church between the Arians 
and Athanasians, between those who believed in the new doc- 
trine of the Trinity and between those who fought against it, 
how natural it would be for a copyist to change a phrase 
this way or that, either on one side or the other, softening 
it down a little, so that it would not bear so emphatically 
against the doctrine which he really believed to be true ! 
A great many times these men might honestly make these 
changes, feeling so sure that they had the right interpretation 
that only good could come from their amending the text a 
little, so that it should be impossible for the careless reader 
to misunderstand it. 

Again, we must remember that the standard of literary 



The Text and the Canon. 29 

ethics then was very different from the modern standard. 
To-day, we call a man a plagiarist, we convict him of literary 
theft, and he would be publicly disgraced, were he capable 
of writing books in such a way as these early workers were 
accustomed, as a common thing, to do. For example, it was 
a very common thing, during the first four or five hundred 
years before Christ and three or four hundred years after, — 
yes, seven or eight hundred years after, — it was quite a 
common thing for them to take the work of earlier writers 
in composing a book of their own, to borrow here and there 
such material from those books as they cared to use, and 
to incorporate it bodily into their own work, adding and 
changing here and there as they pleased, patching and piec- 
ing in such a way that only a critic could detect the way in 
which it had been done. Work of this sort can be traced 
in the manufacture of some of the manuscripts both of the 
Old Testament and the New. 

Not only that, but it was not at all uncommon for writers 
at this time to do another thing which our standard of lit- 
erary honesty would most severely condemn ; and that is to 
put into the mouth of the speaker not the words which he 
really used, but such words, even extending sometimes to 
long speeches, as they supposed he would have used, or 
might properly have used, on such and such an occasion. 
Let me indicate to you how recently work of this kind has 
been done. In some of our modern school-books there are 
speeches or orations, supposed to have been delivered in 
Parliament by celebrated orators, which everybody knows 
w r ere never delivered at all. There were no reporters at 
the time the speeches were made. The way in which the 
speeches were prepared was for some good writer, who knew 
that such a speech had been made at such a time, to write 
out what might have been said on that occasion by that 



30 Beliefs about the Bible. 

speaker; and it passes in the modern world as the real 
speech. Sometimes, a thing of that sort is done by a smart 
reporter now. I was told not a great while ago by a prom- 
inent newspaper man at the head of a leading paper that he 
had sometimes been obliged to report the speeches of pol- 
iticians, when he could not get near enough to hear more 
than now and then a word. Yet he must produce a speech. 
So he caught at this and that, as best he could ; and, know- 
ing the general sentiment of the speaker, he would write out 
as nearly as possible what he might be presumed to say. 
And, once, he did his work so well that he received a per- 
sonal letter with the thanks of the orator. He probably 
wrote out as good a speech as the speaker made, even if it 
was not just the one that he did make. 

To go back to more ancient times, you are accustomed 
to find facts like these in the works of Thucydides, Xeno- 
phon, and Plato. Thucydides and Xenophon put into the 
mouths of military leaders speeches that they made to 
the soldiers on the eve of such and such a battle. But 
every one knows perfectly well that the writers are only 
putting into the mouths of their heroes the speeches which 
they might have made, or which would have been fitting 
to make, not the actual words that they used. If you take 
up the Dialogues of Plato, you find long utterances of 
Socrates ; but Plato does not claim to make a verbal report 
of Socrates' words. He represents the general position of 
Socrates on these subjects; and he puts into his mouth 
words which are not the words of Socrates at all, but which 
are the words of Plato. This is very well, if it is fully 
understood. But, when we know that this may have been 
done in the case of Jesus, and that, in all probability, it was 
done by the writer of the Gospel of John, when he puts 
long prayers and speeches into the mouth of Jesus, which are 



The Text a,7id the Canon, 31 

entirely unlike that which the other three gospel writers give; 
when we are taught to believe that our eternal destiny 
hinges on the accuracy of these reports, it becomes impor- 
tant that w r e should know the character of the literary ethics 
which underlie this work, to know how they are produced, 
and how much weight and authority they carry with them. 

Not only this, but, to go a step farther, not only did they 
incorporate the works of other writers, and put into the 
mouths of speakers and hearers that which they did not 
say, but that which they might have said ; but they went to 
the extent of creating and producing whole books under the 
influence of a doctrinal bias, and for the purpose of carrying 
this or that belief through the public mind, and making it 
dominant in the religious circles of their time, which were 
outright forgeries. We should call them forgeries to-day, 
although it is a serious question whether we ought to hold 
the writers guilty, as we should in the nineteenth century* 
Such writing was not looked upon then as it is now. If a 
man felt that he was serving a good purpose, that he was 
helping on right thought, he considered himself justified in 
doing this kind of work. There are books extant to-dav 
that came very near being incorporated into the Bible \ and 
it is quite possible that such books were incorporated, books 
which were written two or three hundred years perhaps after 
the time of their supposed author, and were published with 
the names of some old saint or hero attached to them, that 
they might gain currency and authority in the great religious 
discussions of the time. We must remember these things, 
when we take up the question as to the accuracy and authen- 
ticity of the manuscripts that have come to be part of our 
modern Bible. 

Let me pass now to the manuscripts of the Old Testa- 
ment. I wish to say of them in general that all these things 



32 Beliefs about the Bible. 

which I have said concerning the New Testament will hold 
equally with them, so that I need not repeat them. I only 
wish to call your attention to one or two peculiar facts 
which bear upon the question of their accuracy. You are 
aware, perhaps, that the Hebrew language, as originally 
written, was made up entirely of consonants ; that is, the 
Hebrew word as written or printed has no vowels at all. It 
was quite commonly the case that precisely the same word 
as it appeared on the written manuscript or printed page 
would have this meaning or that, according to the vowels 
which were understood to go along with the consonants 
thus written or printed. To give you a very commonplace 
example, suppose that English were printed without any 
vowels, and you should find the two consonants, b, n, you 
would see that it might mean bane, bone, bean, or been, 
or half a dozen other things, according to the vowels which 
should be combined with these two consonants to complete 
the word. 

There are cases in the Bible where precisely this kind of 
liability to error occurs. As a practical illustration, Prof. 
Robertson Smith tells us that, in one passage, Jacob is rep- 
resented as uttering his dying prophecies and farewell words 
to his sons while leaning upon his bed. Another passage, 
that refers to the same scene, says that he did it leaning 
upon his staff. This is easy of explanation, when we know 
that the two words in Hebrew for bed and staff are precisely 
alike in their consonants, and may be made to mean one or 
the other according to the vowels added. Of course, you 
can see what a wide field for misconception and error there 
is open here. It is long since the time of Christ, some- 
where between the sixth and ninth centuries, that the system 
of vowel points was generally adopted, so that the reading 
of the Hebrew text was settled beyond controversy. 



The Text and the Canon. 33 

Now, then, without spending more time on the actual or 
possible sources of error in the manuscripts, let me say a 
few words in regard to the formation of the canon. As I 
have often said, if we were sure that we had an accurate 
copy of the original text, we should even then need to be 
sure that we had just those books which ought to be included 
in this collection that we call the Bible ; and we should also 
need to know when this collection was settled, and under 
what influences. It is a very common opinion that the Old 
Testament canon was settled at least by the time of Christ ; 
yet this is far from having been the case. About the time 
of Ezra and Nehemiah, the time of the return from the Jew- 
ish captivity, the Pentateuch was about as it stands to-day. 
But long after that time, away down to the time of Christ, 
and for nearly a hundred years after that, the canon of the 
Old Testament remained open; and it was still a question 
which books should be included, and which shut out. 

Under what influences was the canon settled at last ? 
Was there any criticism, any special scholarship brought to 
bear upon it? None whatever. We can have no sort of 
intellectual respect for the decisive influences which at last 
fixed for all time the canon of the Old Testament scriptures. 
There came to be an exaggerated, superstitious reverence 
for the Old Testament in the Jewish mind ; and it was carried 
so far that they believed there was some wondrous, super- 
natural, almost magical significance that might be discovered 
in every word and phrase and letter. It became a matter of 
the utmost importance to them, holding this belief, that they 
should be able to know what words and letters really were 
to be considered part of the Old Testament scriptures ; and 
so there was an arbitrary selection made by the rabbins, 
who determined what particular text should be regarded as 
the true scripture. After this there was a persistent at- 



34 Beliefs about the Bible. 

tempt made, and it was very successful, to suppress every 
other copy, and all variations from this, which they had de- 
termined should be the accepted reading. It was even 
taught that it was a dangerous, a fatal sin to read or have 
to do with any other copies. It therefore became a part of 
the Jews' religion to accept a certain text and no other ; and 
so slavish was the fear induced in connection with this that 
the copyist of the Old Testament books from that time 
copied everything, even to the erasures and blots on the 
page, not daring to depart by a hair's breadth from anything 
which he found in the manuscript. 

The Jewish canon, then, was settled under the influence of 
the rabbins toward the last part of the first century. The 
question whether Esther, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon ; 
or Ecclesiasticus, the Maccabees, and others which now con- 
stitute part of the Apocrypha, should be included or not, 
was suddenly stopped by the destruction of the temple, 
which put an end to the growth of the Old Testament. 

Thus, without any trace of superhuman guidance, was the 
canon of the Old Testament finally settled. And, in my 
opinion, some of the books which were left out are more 
worthy to be there than some admitted ; and I believe that 
they would have been admitted, had it not been for the 
sudden and violent ending of the Jewish nationality. Every- 
thing old was looked at through the haze and glamour of 
supernaturalism. Everything was idealized; and everything 
modern, as it is to-day with us, was regarded as common, 
and not having about it any of those supernatural qualities. 

Now as to the settlement of the New Testament canon. A 
large number of books which have not come down to the mod- 
ern world formerly existed, and stood their chances of becom- 
ing Christian scriptures in the early centuries of the Church. 
There was a very large number of gospels, a great many 



The Text and the Canon. 35 

epistles, and numerous apocalypses, or revelations. Under 
what kind of influences and at what time was it settled 
what should be received as Scripture, and what not ? For 
the first hundred or two years, when the Old Testament 
was regarded as sacred scripture and treated and spoken of 
as such, there was no such feeling for any written books 
of the New Testament, because it was the universal belief 
of the whole body of the Church that Jesus, after a few 
years at ,the most, was to return again from the skies, and 
establish the visible kingdom of God upon earth. In the 
face of an expectation like that, what was the use of writ- 
ten books ? It was only after this dream had faded away 
that the Gospels were composed. The Epistles of Paul were 
written before, to meet important cases of necessity and 
to answer questions arising at the time ; but Paul had prob- 
ably no idea that there would ever be any controversy as 
to whether his doctrines were the absolute truth or not. A 
large number of the books were written after this dream had 
faded away, and they felt the necessity of having some 
present guidance. And as it seemed a long time since 
Jesus had disappeared in the heavens, since the apostles had 
become memories and ideals, — as it became a wonder for 
some old man to be able to say that he had seen one of the 
apostles, or that he had seen somebody who had seen one 
of them, — they began to venerate and reverence that old 
time ; and, as the links which connected them w r ith it more 
closely than anything else, they began to reverence the books 
and writings that tradition asserted had come down from 
this distant past, and which bore in themselves the imprint 
of the personality and authenticity of those men that had 
actually seen the Lord and claimed to know just what he 
said. Under these influences, then, the old Scriptures — old 
at that time — came to take on an air of authority, to be 



36 Beliefs about the Bible. 

invested with popular reverence, to be looked on as some- 
thing closely linked with Him who had come out of the 
heavens and had disappeared into them, and to have about 
them a touch of the divine. 

But who settled what books should come in, and which 
should stay out? You will be a little astonished when I say 
to you that the question never has been settled, and is not 
settled yet. It was settled by the common consent of the 
early Church that the four Gospels should be recognized as 
a part of the New Testament Scriptures; but there has 
been controversy from that day to this concerning such 
books as Revelation, as the second and third Epistles of 
John, the second of Peter, the Epistle of James, and con- 
cerning other parts of the New Testament. 

Let me give you a hint as to the kind of influences which 
came in to determine and settle the question at last. As an 
illustration, suppose I take the Apocalypse or Revelation 
of John, which was probably one of the earliest of the New 
Testament writings. This teaches the immediate or the 
speedy coming of Christ in the heavens. While that belief 
was prevalent in the churches, the book was very popular. 
It was read and accepted everywhere. But when the people 
waited, and Jesus did not come, and the dream faded away, 
the book itself very naturally fell into disrepute. They 
came to believe that the author had been mistaken, or that 
he had not been inspired. Again, there was a fluctuation 
and a return of feeling in its favor, as this failure of the 
prophecies became forgotten. They took it up again, and 
began to read it with a new interpretation, idealizing it, 
putting a new meaning in its gorgeous, figurative language, 
and so getting out of it spiritual edification. They said it 
was not intended to be understood as literal truth con- 
nected with political upheavals and disturbances of that 



The Text and the Canon. 37 

age. Upon this new tide of feeling, the book came back 
into favor. Take again the influence brought to bear on the 
Epistle of James. James was supposed to have repre- 
sented the old First Church in Jerusalem, and was of great 
authority in the early Church. He teaches, however, in 
this Epistle, salvation by works ; and you know it has always 
been a popular Epistle among Unitarians. Paul teaches 
just as vigorously salvation by faith alone, and we can trace 
the controversy in the early Church here. Those who 
believed in Paul did not like the Epistle of James, and 
those who believed in James opposed the Epistles of Paul. 
There are traces in the New Testament of Paul's Epistles 
being treated with the most keen criticism and almost abuse. 
Luther said of James it was an epistle of straw, because it 
went against his prime doctrine of salvation by faith. 
Luther would not have it in the Bible. He proposed also 
to leave out the Revelation, saying it was not worth anything, 
and should not be there. 

I speak of this to show how freely this New Testament 
has been handled. Until the days of the Reformation, no 
such universal, superstitious feelings have been held as are 
prevalent in orthodox circles to-day. The Council of Trent, 
in the sixteenth century, a Catholic council, settled finally 
for Catholicism the canon of the Bible ; and this included not 
only the Old and the New Testaments as we have them, but 
the Apocrypha. There has never been any oecumenical 
council of Protestants, and so there has never been any 
Protestant settlement of the canon of the New Testament. 

What, then, are the results at which we arrive ? Is it not 
quite clear that, even if there ever has been an infallible 
revelation from God in the form of a book, we have in 
our hands no means for adequately determining the limits 
of that revelation ? I certainly know of no way of deciding 



38 Beliefs about the Bible. 

whether Revelation and the Epistle of James should be parts 
of any such book. Even if I knew that God had given an 
infallible revelation in the form of a book, I should not 
know what books they were ; and I have no means of 
knowing. If we choose to shut our eyes, and take the 
authority of an utterly unfounded and unauthentic tradition, 
we can settle the question in that way. We can settle any 
question by shutting our eyes. But, if we choose to keep 
our eyes open, and search for a reason that is satisfactory to 
an unbiassed mind, such a reason is nowhere to be found. 

So much for the canon. Come now to the text. Here 
again let me say, were I sure that God had given an infalli- 
ble book revelation to the world, I should have no sort of 
reason for supposing that I had an accurate verbal copy in 
any English, Greek, or Hebrew manuscript now in existence. 
We have not a single manuscript of the New Testament 
which takes us as near to Jesus as we are to-day to Shak- 
spere. 

The oldest manuscript in existence is the Sinaitic. The 
next is the Vatican, and the third is the Alexandrian. 
The Sinaitic is at St. Petersburg, the Vatican is at the Vat- 
ican, and the Alexandrian in the British Museum. The 
Sinaitic and the Vatican belong to the fourth century, the 
Alexandrian to the fifth. We have no manuscript that takes 
us back nearer to Jesus than the fourth century. Consider 
then, with all these influences to produce variations, what 
might have gone on through those three hundred years con- 
cerning which we are perfectly in the dark, and then tell me 
whether there is any reason which appeals to a rational man, 
which is capable of making him believe that we have any 
one single text of the New Testament so verbally accurate 
as to give us assurance that we have really the word of God 
as he first spoke it to man. Have we any such accurate 



The Text and the Canon. 39 

knowledge of texts or words as justifies any Church in 
pointing out such a text, and saying that, on the strength of 
it, thousands and millions of people are to be sentenced to 
eternal doom? If I am to have the question raised concern- 
ing my eternal welfare, I would like to have it determined on 
the real word of God, if such a thing exists, and not on the 
possible blunder of a copyist. 

Such, then, are the simple facts concerning the text and 
the canon of the Bible. As to more special facts concerning 
the authenticity and authorship of particular parts of the 
Bible, as to when and where and by whom they were written, 
what authority they possess, and the nature of that authority, 
these will be subjects for future research. 



THE PENTATEUCH. 



The Pentateuch means the five books, or, perhaps more 
strictly speaking, the fivefold book. The limits of it, as it 
stands in our Bible to-day, are not precisely what they al- 
ways have been ; for Joshua and Judges were to be found, in 
the old copies of the Hebrew Bible, along with the first five 
books, the whole making substantially one composition 
which went under the general designation of " the Law." 
I shall this morning, however, pay no attention to this fact, 
as it is not essential to my purpose. I shall consider only 
those books that go by the general name of the Pentateuch. 

The traditional belief is that these books were written by 
Moses under immediate, divine inspiration, and of course 
written before the Jews had entered the land of Canaan. 
This is a significant fact to notice, because you will remem- 
ber Moses, the reputed author, died on the other side of the 
Jordan, in the wilderness, at the close of the traditional 
forty years' wandering. 

These five books contain, among other things, an account 
of the creation of the world, the creation of all things that 
live, breathe, and move upon the surface of the earth, in- 
cluding man. They contain an account of the origin and 
distribution of nations, the origin of language, or rather of 
languages, and the origin and nature of evil, popularly 
called the fall of man. Traditionally, they are infallible; 
and their teachings are set up as a standard for human 



The Pentateuch. 41 

belief, a standard to depart from which is, in the popular 
estimation, rebellion against God, outright and wicked infi- 
delity ; and, of course, if the traditional conceptions concern- 
ing these books be true, then it is rebellion against God to 
doubt and deny, or teach anything else. You see then the 
practical importance of the question whether there is suf- 
ficient ground for believing that they are inspired and infalli- 
bly true. 

Those who have held this theory have said that the world 
came into existence in such and such manner, and at such 
and such a time : therefore, it is sin for science to dare to spec- 
ulate or to suggest any other time or method ; and, on that 
theory, it is sin. It is daring to look the Almighty in the 
face, and question the truth of his word. They contain a 
certain account of the origin of man ; and it is no wonder 
that those who hold this to be infallibly true should be hor- 
rified at the suggestions of a scientist like Darwin, because, 
if Darwin be true, God, according to their theory, is not true. 

So concerning all the other questions of which these 
books treat. Because God has said, Thou shalt not suffer a 
witch to live, therefore hundreds and thousands of poor, 
excitable, nervous, weak-minded young women and old 
women have been tortured and put to death. Because 
God has made it the duty of a man to betray to the author- 
ities any confession of doubt as to the truth of this book, 
therefore persecution has become a sacred duty ; and the 
men who with bloody hands and flaming torch kindle the 
funeral pile may look up in the face of our Father in 
heaven, and expect his smile of approval. Because God 
has indorsed slavery, polygamy, massacre, wars of extermi- 
nation, therefore all these things have had their advocates, 
even in the recent past, as eternally right. 

It becomes then a matter of great practical importance in 



42 Beliefs abotit the Bible. 

religion, as well as in science and morals, for us to know 
whether this book, as we hold it in our hands to-day, be the 
utterance of God or the traditions of men. And, because of 
the importance of this, I shall speak as plainly as I can con- 
cerning the Pentateuch. 

There are three main questions that we need to raise and 
to answer : — 

i. Who wrote it, and when ? 

2. Without regard to who wrote it, is it true ? Does it 
tell us the truth in science, history, and chronology ? 

3. Without any regard to whether it is true in its history, 
its chronology, its geology, its science, are we to accept 
its conceptions of God and man as final ? Are they up to 
the standard of our nineteenth century religion and morals? 

These are the three points that, as briefly as I can con- 
sistently with clearness, I want to ask you to consider with 
me. 

You will notice that I coupled together, as though they 
were one, the two questions, when the Pentateuch was writ- 
ten and by whom. I do this because these two questions 
are inextricably woven together. If we find sufficient reason 
to make us believe that Moses wrote it, that settles the 
question when it was written. It was written during his life- 
time. If, however, we find reason to suppose that it was 
composed at some later period, then that negatively settles 
the authorship : Moses at least did not write it. For this 
reason, the questions are practically one. 

I want to treat this subject in such a plain and simple way 
that you will not think I am going into technical and crit- 
ical details that are profound, abstract, and far away. I 
want to make it simple, practical, and concrete, so that 
every man as he opens the book may be his own critic. 

Suppose I should take the complete edition of Shakspere's 



The Pe7itateuch. 43 

works, and, as I glanced through it, I should find passages 
right in the midst of " Macbeth " or " King Lear " or " King 
Richard III.," that referred to the telephone or steamboat ? I 
should know most certainly that, whatever might be true 
concerning the rest of the plays, Shakspere never wrote 
those particular passages. I might, however, grant that it 
was nothing more than the interpolation of some other 
writer, while Shakspere was really the author of all the rest. 
But suppose that these passages are so woven into the text 
that we cannot tear them out without making a break, leav- 
ing a gap, which a master like Shakspere never would have 
left. Suppose, moreover, that I find woven into the very 
substance of some of the plays passages that, by implica- 
tion, and unconsciously on the part of the author, refer, let 
us say, to the corn laws of England, or the agitation concern- 
ing free trade, or the debate about the disestablishment of 
the Church ? Suppose I find these matters taken for granted 
throughout the substance of the plays. What should I be 
compelled to believe ? I should know that Shakspere never 
wrote them, though his name and autograph were on every 
page. Though I had a thousand affidavits certified to by the 
notaries of the time, still I never could be made to believe 
it, because it would be unspeakably absurd on the face of it. 

Now let us look at these five books called the books of 
Moses, and see if we can trace anything parallel to what I 
have alluded to concerning Shakspere. According to the 
popular theory, the Pentateuch must have been written in 
the wilderness, before the children of Israel entered the 
land of Canaan at all. I shall not go into the subject 
deeply, but make general statements. What I give you are 
only specimens of what may be very much enlarged and 
prolonged. 

As we look over the Pentateuch, we find statements like 



44 Beliefs about the Bible, 

this : Such a thing occurred before there was any king over 
Israel. Do you see the significance of that? When was 
there a king over Israel ? You have got to leap over the 
time of the conquest, come down by Joshua and the Judges, 
past the time covered by Samuel and his work, down at 
least to Saul, years and years after the time of Moses, be- 
cause there was no king at all in Israel before that time. 
Yet here this writer says this took place before there was any 
king. Of course, then, he lived after the time when there 
was a king ; and he is calling their attention to something 
that existed in the long distant past. 

Again, we find one of the towns referred to and called by 
the name of Hebron; while we know from Jewish history 
that it was not called by that name until after the conquest 
of the land, and until after Caleb, one of the leaders of the 
people, had conquered this city and had named it Hebron 
after one of his sons. Suppose I should find some document 
purporting to be written by General Washington, and in that 
document he should refer to the city of Chicago. It would 
be precisely parallel to this. 

Again, there are several passages which say, when such 
and such a thing occurred, the Canaanite was then in the 
land. The history teaches us that whole generations after 
the time of Moses had passed by before the Canaanites were 
all expelled. And of course this passage was written long 
after the expulsion. Would Captain Miles Standish be likely 
to write, Such a thing took place while the Indians were still 
in Massachusetts ? 

We find another passage like this, — a command to the 
people not to remove the ancient landmarks which have 
been set up as divisions between one man and his neighbor. 
Before any such command could have issued, the people 
must have been long in possession of the country. Individ- 



The Pentateuch. 45 

ual possession must have been established by common con- 
sent, so that the dividing lines between their property could 
be spoken of as ancient. Sentiment had gathered around 
them with this sense of personal possession, and the public 
mind began to feel that it was wrong to disturb these marks 
that separated between the property of one man and that of 
another. These are superficial hints ; but the finger-marks of 
a later time than that of Moses are all over the Pentateuch. 

Let me now give you an idea of the composition of the 
Pentateuch, which makes the matter plainer still, if possible. 

These five books, or six, if we include Joshua, bear traces 
that they are not one single document written by one single 
hand all the way through, but that they are a composite, rep- 
resenting the work of different writers and different periods 
of time. So clear and distinct is the work of those several 
writers that you can take the book apart into separate pieces 
and have at least three separate books, each one quite com- 
plete and definite by itself. That is, you can have three sep- 
arate stories as though written by three individual persons at 
three different periods of time. 

Suppose that you should go to England and should find 
there, somewhere off in the country, a house, the oldest part 
of which was of Norman architecture, with a later part in 
the Elizabethan style and still another part indicating the 
work of the time of Queen Anne. Suppose there was a 
local tradition that the three parts were built by one archi- 
tect who lived in the time of William the Conqueror, that he 
was inspired to foresee what the Elizabethan and Queen 
Anne styles would be, and that he therefore built the house 
with the three styles at one and the same time : would you 
credit this story ? It is just as credible, reasonable, and easy 
to believe as it is to believe that the first six books of the 
Bible were written at the same time and by the same hand. 



46 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Let me show you how clearly this may be made out. You 
may be surprised to know how very modern this work is. 
The oldest part of it takes us down to about 621 B.C. We 
know from the history of the people that up to this time 
they had never known anything of the second and third 
parts of the Pentateuch ; that they had not known anything 
about the peculiar legislation of the second and third parts ; 
that they had shown no indication of obeying what is be- 
lieved to be the divine legislation of those parts. About 
the year 621 B.C., we trace indications of a part of the Book 
of Deuteronomy. The oldest part of the Pentateuch goes 
by the name of the Book of the Covenants. About the 
time of Josiah, we find indications of what is now a part of 
Deuteronomy, quite distinct in its legislation, commanding 
the people to do things that, up to that time, they had never, 
apparently, heard about or done. Straightway, the people 
begin to obey this Book of Deuteronomy. They follow its 
directions, make it their highest standard, until, in the neigh- 
borhood of 450 B.C., when Ezra comes back from Babylon, 
at the return of the people from the captivity, he brings in 
his hand the book of The Law of the Lord, which makes up 
the third part of this composite, — the Pentateuch. This is 
very markedly different from either of the two preceding 
parts. Until the time of Ezra, there is no proof of the 
people knowing anything about this part of the law, or being 
under any obligation to obey it. After that time, it is the 
standard and guide of the people, in the light of which all 
the preceding portions are interpreted. It becomes a master 
that they at least always claim to obey. Here, then, you 
see that we can take these three documents apart, and have 
three different stories and three different eras or epochs of 
legislation. This is settled beyond question in the mind of 
every intelligent and unbiassed critic. A man would prove 



The Pentateuch. 47 

a lack of scholarship or a lack of fairness by even claiming 
a doubt. By these surface indications, by the structure of 
the book, it is placed beyond question that Moses did not 
write the substance of the Pentateuch or any one of its 
books. The historical portions of the Old Testament run- 
ning parallel with the Pentateuch make all this clear. 

Are we, then, to refer nothing of the Pentateuch to Moses ? 
Moses was the great traditional leader and law-giver of the 
people ; and it was perfectly natural that, as time w r ent on, 
they should refer everything back to him. A precisely anal- 
ogous thing is going on right before our eyes. If you will 
only read the development of the doctrines of the Catholic 
Church, you will find it is very simple at the outset, growing 
more and more complex and composite with every passing cen- 
tury, — now announcing the doctrine of the immaculateness of 
the virgin, then exalting her to be mother of God, a deity, 
and taking her to heaven ; then passing from the infallibility 
of the Church to the infallibility of the Pope himself, — all this 
grand development of doctrine going on, yet the Church claim- 
ing all the time that it has not changed its doctrine from the 
very beginning until now. The Church does not admit that 
it has added an article of belief to its faith in all these cen- 
turies : it is simply formulating now what the Church has 
always believed. That is the claim. So the Jews, as time 
went on, age after age, simply claimed that they were putting 
into new shape what was implied in the work that Moses 
did, and which was the teaching of the law of Moses. It is 
not peculiar then to ancient times. The process is going 
on around us to-day. 

Did Moses then have nothing to do with it ? That is a 
very hard question to answer. He may have been the author 
of the ten commandments, — not in the form in which they 
stand to-day, but in some briefer, simpler form, — because, 



48 Beliefs about the Bible. 

originally, they were called " the ten words." He may have 
been the author, then, of the ten commandments. It is 
questionable whether we can attribute anything to him 
beyond that ; and even so much is not quite certain. 

Now let us pass to our second point. The Pentateuch 
we have found to be written not by any one person nor at 
any one time. It covers centuries, and comes down to at 
least 450 B.C. But no matter who wrote it, no matter when 
it was written, the most important thing for us to settle is 
whether it is true ; whether it contains divine and infallible 
truth concerning God, concerning science, concerning mat- 
ters of chronology and history. If we can find that it is 
true, then we can accept it ; and it will become authority to 
us. It will be just as authoritative as the multiplication 
table ; and it will make little difference who wrote it or when 
it was written. Here, again, I can only give you a few ex- 
amples ; because, to cover the whole ground, would require 
a whole book, and a large book at that. 

Take the story of the origin of the world, the creation, as 
it is told in Genesis. Can we believe it to-day ? It tells us 
that the world was created, and not only the world, but the 
sun, moon, and stars, the whole visible universe, six thou- 
sand years ago ; that it was created: in six natural days. I 
hope that none of you will be deceived in regard to this mat- 
ter, or put off with any theory of indefinite epochs, such as 
have been used to explain the meaning of the word "day." 
The evening and the morning were the first day; and the 
evening and the morning were the second day. The author 
definitely tells us that he was talking about days bounded by 
the evening and the morning. Nothing can be clearer than 
that ; and it is simply shuffling, it is dishonest, it is disingen- 
uous, playing with words, for anybody to attempt to recon- 
cile Genesis and science by considering these days as long 



The Pentateuch. 49 

periods of time. If you so consider them, then the seventh 
day, the Sabbath, is a long rest ; and we should have to rest 
for six or ten or twenty thousand years. The writer then tells 
us that the world was created in six natural days, six thou- 
sand years ago, and that a certain definite order was followed 
in that creation. It says that light w r as created on the first 
day, and that the sun, moon, and stars were created on the 
fourth day. According to this, we had light and evenings and 
mornings for three days before we had any sun, moon, or 
stars; and, if you are going to stretch those days to long 
periods of time, we must have had millions of years of 
mornings and evenings before we had sun, moon, or stars. 

One other point. It tells us that the fishes and the birds 
were created on the same day, and that on the next day the 
animals, creeping things, reptiles, etc., were created. Now, 
it is a commonplace in scientific knowledge that the reptiles 
preceded the birds on earth. Here, again, is a grand mis- 
take as to the order of the creative work. So much as to 
the indications of the difficulties here. 

There is another and distinctive account of the creation, 
in Genesis, written by a different hand and at a different 
time. These two accounts contradict each other. In one, 
Adam and Eve were made on the same day. In the other, 
Adam was made a day or two, or several long epochs of 
time, if you so consider it, before Eve was made. All the 
animals were passed in review before Adam, to see if he 
could choose one which he could be reconciled to take as a 
companion. He does not find any to suit him ; and the 
Lord, having decided that it was not good for Adam to be 
alone, makes Eve for a companion for him. 

Passing from these, let us come to what the Bible has to 
tell us in regard to the origin of languages. You know it has 
become a great, distinct, wide-reaching science of itself, so 



50 Beliefs about the Bible. 

that the discovery of any critical point in the development 
of a language is enough to make a man famous all over the 
world. But does Prof. Whitney or Max Miiller or any 
of the great leading linguists of the world ever think of 
going back to the Bible to study the building of the Tower 
of Babel as having anything to do with the origin and diver- 
sity of languages ? There is not an intelligent man in the 
world who would not smile at the suggestion • and yet, ac- 
cording to the popular ideas of Orthodoxy, these men should 
go to the plains of Shinar, and accept the fact that the Lord 
in heaven, becoming seriously alarmed lest these gigantic 
and presumptuous men might scale the holy heights to his 
throne, to prevent such a catastrophe, came down and looked 
over the country to see what they were doing, and decided 
to confound their language, so that they could not talk to 
each other, and thus puts an end to their enterprise. This is 
the account the Bible gives us of the origin of languages. 
It would be an insult to your intelligence to tell you that it 
is not true. 

Take two or three figures concerning the Israelites and 
their departure from Egypt. It is said that seventy souls 
went down into Egypt. At the end of their sojourn there, 
they had increased so that there were three millions, — an 
utterly incredible story. There were as many Hebrews then 
as there were inhabitants in the thirteen colonies at the time 
of the Revolution. Out of these three millions, there were, 
it is said, six hundred thousand fighting men; that is, they 
had an army as big as the biggest one in modern Europe. 
Yet, when they started out, and Pharaoh gathered together 
his horses and chariots to pursue them, they whimpered and 
cried and were afraid, and called upon Moses as though 
they were going to be eaten up, instead of standing up to 
fight for their liberty and freedom with their army of six 



The Pentateuch. 51 

hundred thousand men. It is a little curious, too, since the 
Bible tells us that during the plagues in Egypt all the ani- 
mals were destroyed, how Pharaoh had no trouble in gather- 
ing horses enough for a large army. 

Look at another thing. There were three millions of 
people in the land of Goshen, as many as there were in 
the whole of the United States at the time of the Revolu- 
tionary war. Yet word is got around to all these people so 
quickly that, in one night, they departed in such haste that 
they took their unleavened bread in their kneading-troughs, 
taking also their horses, cattle, fowls, all domestic animals, 
the old and the young, the sick and the well. The whole of 
the three millions of people were notified to gather up 
everything that they possessed, and to leave the country in 
one night. If anybody can believe that, he need have no 
further trouble with Munchausen or the Arabian Nights. It 
is utterly incredible and absurd. And when the three mill- 
ions of people enter Palestine, though the whole country 
was not so large as the State of Massachusetts, they are 
warned to drive the inhabitants out slowly, lest the wild 
beasts of the land get the upper hands of them ! 

In the third place, look at a few of the implications as to 
the religious and moral character of the God of the Hebrews 
at this time, and see whether you can accept the religious 
and moral teaching of the Pentateuch as valid for us in the 
nineteenth century. I want, however, to bear distinct testi- 
mony to all that is good, grand, tender, and sublime in the 
Pentateuch ; and there is a great deal, a great deal that the 
highest and most lovely civilization in any age need not be 
ashamed of or apologize for. Take the opening words of 
Genesis, for example, — though you must remember that 
they were written toward the time of Christ, — the sublim- 
ity of the picture of God saying, Let there be light, and 



52 Beliefs about the Bible. 

there was light. This conception of God is grand. Again, 
we find grand conceptions of him as the thunderer, as he 
who dwells in the heavens, who rules over his people, guides 
them, loves them, cares for them. All these things I wish 
to admit in a word ; but the question is not whether there is 
grand and noble teaching, but, Is all the teaching infallible 
and inspired ? That is the question. With the answer to 
that question the popular theory must stand or fall. 

Let us look at a few indications. Let us take this same 
God, in the very first chapter ojE Genesis, in regard to his 
creative work. I refer to the puerility of that idea of having 
all the animals pass in review before Adam for him to see 
if there was any one suitable to be a companion for him. 
Take the creation of Eve as given to us,-— the Almighty put- 
ting Adam to sleep, and performing a surgical operation, 
taking a bone out of his side and making a woman out of 
it : this picture of the infinite God of this universe coming 
down and working in that fashion ; and, again, after the fall, 
represented as becoming butcher, tanner, and tailor, killing 
animals, and out of the skins making coats for Adam and 
Eve to wear ! This is what it tells us. You must take these 
facts in their literalness and simplicity, and not refine them 
away with your spiritualizing methods and interpretations. 

Take the God who makes this man and woman and puts 
them into the garden without the slightest particle of experi- 
ence, without knowing they had an enemy in all the universe, 
and then making not only their own fate, but the fate of all 
the world depend on one ignorant act, he himself knowing 
that the serpent was coming, yet not a breath or hint of it 
given to them. Conceive the state of mind of a people who 
believed that the future of the whole human race could 
depend on whether they ate an apple or did not, who could 
believe and make Jehovah himself believe that the question 



The Pentateuch, 53 

of the immortality of these sinful people depended on 
whether they could taste another apple or not. For it tells 
us that God was afraid they would get hold of the tree of 
life and become deathless ; and, lest such a thing should 
happen, lest they should eat of this tree and become immor- 
tal, he drove them out of the garden and put flaming swords 
and dragons at the gate. You must rid yourselves of the 
notion that the cherubim were angels. A cherub in the old 
Hebrew was a dragon as much as was the one that guarded 
the garden of the Hesperides. It was a dragon that was 
placed at the entrance to the garden of Eden to keep Adam 
and Eve from returning thither. 

I have referred to the story of Babel. I will not speak 
about the kind of God implied in the story of the flood. 
Let me speak rather of the character, the conception of the 
God who comes to Abraham in the form of man, with two 
angels for companions. He sits down in the tent-door of 
the Arab chieftain, while he hastens to bake cakes, to catch a 
calf and dress and roast it ; and then the Almighty God of 
the universe is pictured as eating roast veal and cakes with 
Abraham. That is what it tells us. And, after he makes a 
certain promise concerning Sarah, he notices that Sarah is 
laughing at him behind his back, because she does not be- 
lieve a word of what he is saying ; and he rebukes her for 
her discourtesy. These are some of the pictures that are 
given of God in all their crudeness of barbaric conception. 

Look at the exodus, and see what kind of a God deals with 
Pharaoh and with the children of Israel. He declares be- 
forehand to Moses that he is going to harden Pharaoh's 
heart, so that, in spite of everything he shall do, he will not 
consent to their going. He takes upon himself the blame 
for the future conduct of Pharaoh, or at least the responsi- 
bility for it. He distinctly indorses lying at the very outset. 



54 Beliefs about the Bible. 

He tells Moses to say that they want to go three days' 
journey into the wilderness to sacrifice to God. He does 
not say anything about running away. He tells them to 
deceive Pharaoh, to get his consent on false pretences. And, 
for what Pharaoh does, he punishes the whole land of Egypt, 
— men, women, and children. Not only that ; but he pun- 
ishes with disease and death all the poor, innocent cattle 
throughout the whole realm, — punishes them for what he has 
made one man do. 

Let us go on a little further. We find that this God, on 
more than one occasion, distinctly and definitely indorses 
lying to carry out a purpose. What else does he do ? He 
distinctly indorses human sacrifice. It is implied all the 
way through. In accordance with this implication, human 
sacrifice lasted in Israel till within a few centuries of the 
time of Christ. The God of Moses distinctly commands 
human sacrifice. He says, if you have vowed to devote a 
man unto the Lord in sacrifice, you shall not in any wise 
suffer him to be redeemed, he shall surely be put to death. 

Take another thing. When Achan sins, what does the 
Lord do? He commands Moses to go and separate not 
only this one man from the people, but his wives, his 
brothers, his sons-in-law, his daughters-in-law, the whole 
clan, — men, women, and children, — all the cattle and house- 
hold goods and effects that he owned ; and then the earth 
opens and swallows them up. He punishes with torture and 
death not only the man himself, but everybody related to 
him, — as though, if one of you here to-day should commit a 
larceny or a murder, your whole family — wife, friends, and 
relatives — should be tortured and put to death for it. 
That is the method 'in the Pentateuch. 

I wonder if you have ever noticed this : that in this same 
Pentateuch there is a command that on a certain occasion 



The Pentateuch. 55 

a city should be captured, and that all the men and all the 
married women and little children should be put to death, as 
likewise all the cattle ; but that the young, unmarried women 
should be saved alive, and distributed among the soldiers and 
the priesthood. What do you think of that kind of a god 
for the worship of the nineteenth century ? Slavery, polyg- 
amy, wars of extermination, everything barbaric that you can 
name, — I cannot catalogue any more, — you will find in- 
dorsed somewhere within the limits of the Pentateuch ; and, 
if that is the divine and infallible word of God for all time, 
then these crimes, these barbarisms that the world has re- 
pudiated with horror as belonging to uncivilized times, ought 
to be recognized as part of the ethical and religious code of 
Boston in the nineteenth century. 

Is it necessary for us to assume a theory of inspiration to 
account for this book of the Pentateuch ? The highest con- 
ceptions of God which are entertained there were entertained 
in Egypt before Moses was born. Its highest and noblest 
morals were also held and practised to some extent in 
Egypt long before Moses was born. Is it necessary to as- 
sume inspiration to account for these mistakes in science and 
chronology, to account for this conception of God and this 
code of morality which we have seen to be so barbaric and 
defective ? 

In closing, I wish to call your most sincere and earnest 
attention to two or three things : — 

In the first place, I wish you to note that I have not been 
attacking the Pentateuch. I am simply telling you about it. 
I am directly and indirectly attacking a theory held concern- 
ing it, which the Pentateuch neither asserts, implies, nor 
indorses. And I wish to say, further, that, when we take 
a rational, natural view of the origin of this book, we find 
nothing there which need surprise us, nothing there which 



56 Beliefs about the Bible, 

calls for apology. The views of the origin of the world, 
/of the nature of God, of the origin of man and of evil, are 
similar to those which were entertained by other peoples in the 
\ same relative grade of civilization. They are simply the views 
concerning God, man, and the world, through which every 
people in its development naturally passes, but in which no 
people ought to stay. That is the point. When, then, we 
take this natural theory of the origin and growth of these 
books, we find what we should expect; and we are com- 
forted by the consideration that we are compelled to believe 
that religion and morality are a part of the nature of things, 
and, as such, based on eternal foundations ; that they grow 
as nations grow, that they take on the character of special 
grades of civilization, that they are lifted up as civilization 
is lifted up, that they are enlightened as men are enlight- 
ened, made broad and tender and humane as men are 
brought up to the ideal of their humanity. 

But, on the other hand, consider the difficulties that harass 
us at every step, if we take the old and traditional theory 
of these books. We are compelled perpetually to disingen- 
uous twisting and turning of texts, in order to bring it any- 
where into harmony with the demonstrated facts of the 
modern world. We are compelled practically to be dis- 
honest with ourselves in regard both to science and the 
inspiration of the Pentateuch. We are compelled to believe 
that certain moral characteristics which arose in the bar- 
barism of the past world are the eternal right and wrong of 
God. We are compelled perpetually to apologize for God ; 
to explain to men how it could be possible that he who is the 
loving, tender Father of men to-day was once the cruel, 
bloody, heartless, false persecutor and deceiver of men. 

Is it not then something, not to mourn over, but to be 
grateful for, to get such a belief in the growth of religion and 



The Pentateuch. 57 

morality, such a conception of the origin and development 
of sacred books, as shall permit us to use our brains, to keep 
the tenderness of our hearts, and at the same time to be loyal 
to our highest thought of the living God ? 



THE PROPHETS. 



Lest I should be misunderstood on what is quite an 
important point for a general comprehension of the develop- 
ment of the Hebrew religion, I take this occasion to say that, 
if I had pursued the strict chronological order of develop- 
ment, I should have taken this subject first, and the Penta- 
teuch afterward. That is, the work of the prophets pre- 
ceded the law in the shape in which it appears in our Bible 
to-day. The period of prophecy, I may say, in a general 
way, stretches from the eleventh or twelfth century B.C. to 
the fifth century B.C. Parts of the Pentateuch appeared at 
various times during this period ; but it was not brought into 
its present shape, as we have it now, until the greater part 
of the work of the prophets had been accomplished, some- 
where within the fifth century ; so that, chronologically speak- 
ing, instead of saying the Law, the Prophets, and the Writ- 
ings, we should say the Prophets, the Law, and the 
Writings. Please bear this in mind, so as not to misunder- 
stand the real order of development, as I give you some 
indications of the crude and barbaric origin of prophecy 
among the Jews. 

The traditional idea of prophecy, the one in which I 
myself grew up as a boy, and which I held even in the 
beginning of my own ministry, and that which, I believe, is 
widely prevalent in the public mind, is that the prophets 



The Prophets, 59 

were a distinct order of men, appearing only among the 
Hebrews, and leaving traces of themselves only in the 
religion of Israel and in the Old Testament; that they 
were in a certain sense a homogeneous body of men; 
that though they might be like the different instruments in 
an orchestra, each playing his own special part, yet, to- 
gether, they made one music ; that they had substantially the 
same ideas of right and wrong, and those the very highest, 
the divine and unchanging ideas of ethics ; that they had 
substantially the same ideas concerning God, all agreeing 
in the highest, most refined, sublimated, and spiritual 
thoughts of God, such as are fitted to lead on and lift the 
thought of the world forever. Beyond this, it is a part of 
the popular idea that one of the main duties of the prophets 
was to foretell future events, things that were to occur fifty, 
a hundred, or a thousand years in the future, which, by no 
possibility, could be foreseen except by some one directly 
and supernaturally illuminated by the divine spirit itself; 
that, thus illuminated, they became a direct proof of the 
supernatural nature of religion, one of the foremost pillars 
to uphold the popular conception of the supernatural char- 
acter of the Bible, and the religion it represents. 

I remember when I used, as a theological student, to be 
considering the great matter of Christian evidence, that the 
miracles and the prophets were placed side by side, like 
the two great pillars, Jachin and Boaz, that stood in the 
porch of Solomon's temple. Miracles and the prophets were 
the two unimpeachable supernatural evidences of divine 
inspiration and the infallibility of the Bible. 

The special thing that the prophets wers able to see and 
foretell, as was supposed, was the coming Messianic kingdom. 
They were commissioned to outline in unmistakable terms 
the figure of Jesus as the coming Messianic King, and thus 



60 Beliefs about the Bible. 

to foreshadow all the glory of his divine and eternal reign. 
This seems to me to be a fair representation of the tra- 
ditional idea of the prophets and their work. I shall only 
treat it indirectly, as I go on with my subject. 

Let me call your attention to three quite distinct and 
definite phases of the development of prophecy among the 
Jews. I do not mean to say that these three are clearly 
outlined, following one after another, without any very 
marked connection between them. I only say that, in the 
continuous line of development, from the seer or soothsayer 
up to Isaiah, there are marked phases that it is worth while 
to notice. 

In the first place, as I open the Bible, I find sixteen books, 
four called the major prophets and twelve the minor, repre- 
senting the work of those whose writings or sayings have 
been traditionally preserved for us. A part of these sixteen 
books were not spoken, not preached, not delivered at all, 
but were simply written. Some of them were undoubtedly 
spoken, and then written out afterward either by the 
prophet himself or by some one who heard him, who sup- 
posed himself to be correctly reporting what the prophet 
said. 

As you look over any one of them, — Isaiah, for example, 
— you will find that a very small part of it even pretends to 
be given in the form of prediction, to foretelling anything 
that is about to take place in the immediate or in the far- 
distant future. Neither are we to understand that all of 
these books were written by the persons whose names stand 
at their heads in all cases, nor that any one of them was 
written through, just as it stands, by any one author. At 
least, it is safe to say that, in a large number of cases, they 
represent a variety of authorship. They are made up as one 
might make up the speeches of Burke or Sheridan, if he had 



The Prophets. 6 1 

only fragments of them, parts written here and there, col- 
lected without much regard to their quality, and without 
much regard to their chronology or place or time of 
delivery, the whole collected perhaps many years after they 
were spoken, and edited by some one who should put them 
in final shape for posterity. This is the general conception 
that you are to have of these written prophecies. 

Now for the contents of some of them. Suppose we open 
Isaiah, and indicate briefly some specimens of the topics 
treated. In one chapter, he goes on to encourage the people 
when they are in distress and are downcast by giving them 
general promises of the divine favor, and by assuring them 
of deliverance after they shall have received the requisite 
amount of punishment which they have deserved, and which 
he declares to be for their good. Then, he rebukes the 
tyranny, the impurity, the idolatry, or some other sin, of the 
king or some of the great ones at court. Then, he will turn 
to animadvert very severely on the fashionable frivolities of 
the ladies of Jerusalem at that time, describing the tinkling 
ornaments, the wristlets and anklets and bells, and telling 
them they would certainly meet with divine judgment and 
retribution for this lightness and frivolity of life. Then, the 
prophet takes up some burden concerning the present condi- 
tion of Egypt or Assyria, threatening divine judgment on 
them for their encroachment on the people of God, or some 
judgment on the king for entertaining the idea of alliance 
with these foreign powers. Then, idol worship in the high 
places, the mingling of the people in the lascivious worship 
of Ashera, the Syrian Venus, are reproved. In this way, the 
prophet is more a preacher of righteousness than one who 
foretells events that are to take place at some future time. 
In some few places there may be what may be called proph- 
ecies ; but what they mean I shall consider later. 



62 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Now take a step back, and see another type of prophet. 
Take the prophet Elijah. He wrote nothing. None of his 
speeches, if he ever made any, have been recorded. There 
are only isolated words or sayings. He is not the man of 
writing, the man with a pen, the man of words. He is a 
man of deeds, the actor, the one who appears at some crisis 
of the nation's history, and casts into the scale of what he 
believes to be right and truth the tremendous weight of his 
supposed supernatural, divine influence. He stands up for 
what he believes to be the rights of the people, and attacks 
the tyranny and idolatry of the king. He appears like a 
meteor flashing across the startled sky of one of those old 
superstitious kings, and then disappears again into the night. 
Like John the Baptist, he dresses himself in sackcloth, eats 
whatever he can find in the wilderness, spends years at a 
time living in the desert places or concealed among the few 
people who believed in him, and at some crisis epoch of the 
people appears, suddenly startling the king and nobility out 
of their semi-secure state. He appears to Ahab, and an- 
nounces that for three and one half years it shall not rain, 
and then disappears. At the end of that time, he suddenly 
reappears to Ahab, as he is far away from the capital, and 
tells him to hasten to the palace ; for he hears the sound of 
rain. He then goes up into a mountain, and sees a little 
cloud no larger than a man's hand, which spreads over the 
sky. Then, in that wild, rapid, frenzied way of the times, he 
cries out, runs down to Ahab, and in front of his chariot till 
he reaches the royal city of Samaria. This is a different 
type of prophet from Ezekiel or Isaiah. 

Go back, and note a third phase, earlier still than these. 
Here is Samuel, not worshipping in the temple, for there is 
no temple ; having no fear about the high places \ worship- 
ping God under the image of a bull or golden calf, as it is 



The Prophets. 63 

called in some parts of the Bible ; and engaged in the prac- 
tice of what we should call to-day clairvoyance, soothsaying, 
or, except for the evil significance of it, witchcraft. He is 
the man to whom Saul goes to find out where something is 
that has been lost. We find, in connection with this sort 
of prophecy, there were what were called schools of the 
prophets, — gatherings of young men who lived in the same 
place, and who were susceptible to this same curious kind of 
influence which came upon them, and who, when they were 
under this influence, acted like madmen, stripped off their 
clothes, lay for a day and a night naked upon the ground, 
uttering meaningless cries and sounds, and were supposed, 
while in this condition, to be controlled, guided, by the 
indwelling spirit of the God who had taken possession of 
them. 

I want now to show you what kind of influence this was, 
and how it was interpreted by the people. 

If we go back to ancient Greece, we shall find they had 
one method of divination which was by the casting of dice. 
They had painted dice, and, after going through some relig- 
ious ceremony, or praying to some particular god, they threw 
these dice, and then interpreted the will of the god accord- 
ing to the indications of the throw. As we read about that 
in the heathen writers, it strikes us as utterly irreligious, as 
promotive of anything but piety or spiritual worship. Yet 
do not be startled when I tell you that the eleven apostles, 
after the suicide of Judas, took precisely this method for 
getting at the divine will as to the appointment of the 
twelfth man to take the place of the betrayer. If you 
remember the story in the Book of Acts, it says that the 
apostles gathered together and picked out two men, either of 
whom they thought would be a fitting one to fill this impor- 
tant office. Then, they prayed to God and cast lots, or threw 



64 Beliefs about the Bible. 

dice, as we should say. In this way, as they supposed, was 
indicated the will of God as to which one of the two should 
be the chosen. 

There is another thing worth our notice in this connection 
in the New Testament. In the Book of Acts, it says that, at 
the time of the Pentecost, when the divine spirit came like a 
rushing mighty wind, and when the Holy Ghost like cloven 
tongues of fire appeared on the heads of the members of the 
infant church there gathered, the disciples spoke with tongues. 
Remember that the Book of Acts was written a great many 
years after Paul wrote his Epistles. Tradition had enlarged 
the original story until the writer really supposed, and tells us, 
that these persons spoke so that the different nationalities that 
were gathered there all understood them, each speaking in 
his own language. 

Now go back a step, and see what Paul says about this 
same phenomenon. Paul tells us that there were a great 
many different gifts of the spirit among the young churches. 
Some understood the gift of prophecy, some had gifts of 
healing, some could lay their hands on others and they 
would receive the spirit. Among these gifts was one called 
the gift of tongues. Those who read the New Testament 
superficially suppose this was the gift of speaking in other 
languages ; and this is what the author of Acts had in mind. 
If you study the language of Paul carefully, you will find 
nothing of the kind. The man who has the gift of tongues 
thrills, quivers, sighs, rolls up his eyes, is in a rapt, " pos- 
sessed " condition, and in this condition he pours out a stream 
of meaningless sounds; he babbles. This is what Paul 
means when he tells us about speaking with tongues. But 
he and the early Church supposed this was a divine utterance 
of the spirit of God who had taken possession of the per- 
sons, and that the sounds, meaningless to ordinary hearers, 



The Prophets, 6$ 

contained some divine message which required an inspired 
interpreter to tell the people what it was. Do not seek this 
gift of tongues, he says, because it does not edify, unless 
there is some one who can interpret. Do not bring discredit 
on the young Church by seeking to practise these gifts, 
unless there is some one present with the divine power of 
interpreting these meaningless cries, and of telling the 
people the message that ought to be conveyed. He dis- 
tinguishes this from what he calls prophecy by saying he 
would rather prophesy, or speak five words that people could 
understand, than any number of words in a tongue. It is 
not an unknown tongue. The translators, supposing that 
was what he meant, put in the word " unknown." It is not in 
the original. 

This same phenomenon reappeared in modern London 
under the preaching of the famous but eccentric Edward 
Irving. But that which was divine inspiration in the first 
century was repressed as an impropriety in the nineteenth. 

Now come back to the Old Testament, and find some 
traces of the method by which the people believed they 
could come into possession of divine knowledge. It was 
very common for the people, when they wanted to find out 
any hidden thing, to go to the high priest and ask him to 
divine by Urirn and Thummim. What were these ? They were, 
it is thought, bright precious stones which were set in the 
high priest's breastplate. We do not know how they used 
them ; but, in some way, these precious stones were supposed 
to have the magical power of divination. The high priest, 
as the result of some special ceremony or sacrifice, by the 
use of these stones, precisely as a modern fortune-teller by 
cards, was able to tell secrets, and answer the questions of 
those who came to him. 

We do not know, as I said, the special method of using 



66 Beliefs about the Bible* 

these stones ; but, as a possible hint, I may say there are a 
great many stories of magical stones that were supposed, 
after a religious ceremony, to have the power of disclosing 
what was going on in distant places by a series of shadows 
passing across the face of the stone itself, so that the person 
who held the stone to his eye could see these moving pict- 
ures. Whether this was the way in which they divined the 
future by Urim and Thummim, I do not know. 

There was another method of divination that was by the 
use of the efihod. This was a curious girdle of the priest, 
which again in some way, the actual report of which has not 
come down to us, was used in processes of divination. 
They also used the teraphint, small idols, in the same way. 
You will recollect that Rachel, when fleeing from her father, 
laid so much stress on these portable deities that she stole 
them from her father and hid them in the furniture of her 
camel and sat upon them, thinking thus she should be able 
to keep with herself the divine favor and magical protection 
that went along with the little images of the gods. 

I speak of these things as common throughout the Old 
Testament. Let me give you one or two as illustrations, for 
it seems as though people read the Bible with their eyes 
shut, or else as though they considered these things as some- 
thing entirely distinct from the practices of other nations and 
other religions. 

Let us stand for a moment with Moses in the presence of 
Pharaoh, and see him holding his magical rod in his hand. 
Moses, of course, was looked on by Pharaoh as a sooth- 
sayer, a magician, a prophet like those he already knew, and 
any number of whom he had about him. When Moses 
flings down his rod, and it turns to a serpent, all the others 
throw theirs down, and they turn into serpents also. Moses 
possesses no power which is not common to the other magi- 



The Prophets. 67 

cians, except — and here is the indication of the interpreta- 
tion given by a later belief to these old traditions — the God 
of Moses was a greater God than the God of Pharaoh. 
Moses did not doubt the existence of the gods of Egypt. 
There is no trace of that whatever. Until after the time of 
David, there was no doubt as to the reality of the existence 
of the gods of other peoples. Moloch and Dagon and As- 
tarte were real gods. The only point was that Yahveh, the 
god of the people of Israel, was above all the others, a 
greater god than any of the rest. That was proved satisfac- 
torily to Moses, when his serpent ate up all the other ser- 
pents. These magicians could turn their rods to serpents, 
but only his serpent could eat the others. This showed the 
supremacy of the God of Moses. 

When a king went to war, it was not simply a war be- 
tween two peoples and their kings, but it was a war between 
their gods also ; for Dagon on one side and Yahveh on the 
other were supposed to fight just as much as the Philistine 
king and the king of Israel and their followers. Precisely 
the same is true in the Iliad. There the Greeks and Tro- 
jans were fighting on the plains, but the air was thick with 
the gods of Olympus urging on and inspiring the champions, 
guiding the dart of one, the spear of another, overthrowing 
the horses and chariots, so that, when the day was done, it 
was a question whether the conquest was achieved by the 
people or by the invisible gods and goddesses of the air. 
We find these ideas throughout ancient times, and they are 
as apparent all over the surface of the Old Testament as in 
the tales of the Greek and Roman mythologies. 

Let me give you an illustration of the way the Greeks 
used to divine, and see how all this belongs to one stage of 
development. Had you gone to Dodona, in Greece, you 
would have found there one of the most famous of all the 



68 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ancient oracles. Any one who came to Dodona could ask a 
question as to the future, or about any hidden thing, and get 
an answer from the priest in charge. How did the priest 
get his information ? He listened to the rustling of the wind 
in the supposed sacred Dodona oaks and beeches ; and he 
claimed to have the divine power of interpreting the sounds 
made by this rustling, and thus getting the divine message. 
Suppose you were to go to another famous oracle of the 
Greeks, perhaps the one best known, the oracle of Delphi. 
What would you have found there ? A temple built over a 
chasm, or cave, from which issued a vapor ; and this vapor 
either actually had, or was supposed to have, the power of 
setting nervous organizations, such as were adapted to be 
priests at Delphi, into a mesmeric or convulsive condition. 
Whatever was true under its influence, it was only such an 
influence as you could produce by giving certain gases now. 
The person becomes unconscious ; and before he is entirely 
gone, as we say, he gives utterance to certain words or inco- 
herent sounds and cries. These words were supposed to be 
the utterance of the gods who had taken possession of them, 
and these were the answers that were given to those who 
came to inquire at their shrine. 

This excited condition was sometimes induced by the aid 
of instruments of music, as in the case of Samuel. The 
school of prophets was preceded by the harp, the tabret, and 
pipe. We find this the case all over the world among bar- 
baric people. Certain persons who are very susceptible are 
wrought on by these sounds until they are supposed to be 
in a religious frenzy and able to give divine messages to the 
people. It is also produced by drugs of certain kinds. In 
India, the Soma, a drink capable of producing intoxication, 
was formerly worshipped as a god, and the person under its 
influence was supposed to be delivering a divine message. 



The Prophets. 69 

Many of these things, though haloed by the glamour of 
distance and the superstitious reverence that gathers about 
the past, were precisely analogous to the results of religious 
frenzy as exhibited in the excitement of modern revivals. 
He who — as I have — has attended a negro revival meeting, 
or who has attended a Methodist church on the frontier, and 
has seen a man or woman rolling on the floor, possessed by 
" the power," knows what ignorance is ready to call divine. 

Again, one of the prevailing beliefs common all through 
the Bible, in the New Testament as well as the Old, was in 
the divine meaning of dreams. Either the person himself, 
or some other person for him, could interpret these dreams. 
Joseph had the power of dreaming and of interpreting his 
own dreams. Pharaoh had wonderful dreams, but he had to 
call Joseph in to give him the meaning. The people had 
no doubt that these dreams brought a meaning from the 
other world, and that thus they came into the possession of 
divine secrets. 

Let me now give you the underlying idea, the common 
belief of barbaric men out of which all these beliefs have 
sprung. You are aware, perhaps, that the soul and body 
have been regarded in almost all ages, from earliest times 
certainly, as quite separable and distinct from each other, 
not only as capable of being separated at death, but 
temporarily, so that the spirit could go out of a man, and 
he could lie like a vacant house with no occupant, till it 
came back; or, during his absence, another spirit could come 
in, and take possession. To take possession of a man, then, 
merely meant that some other spirit had come into his 
body, and made him do what it would, in spite of the man's 
individuality. We have a reminiscence of this in our com- 
mon language. We say of a person that has fainted, " He 
has gone." That used to mean the soul had gone, had left 



yo Beliefs about the Bible. 

the body. Even now, when a person is getting over a 
fainting fit, we say he is "coming to," — his soul is coming 
back to the body. We carry this survival of the once 
universal idea into our language to this day. It was 
believed in all sincerity in the Old Testament and New; 
it was believed in Homer; it was believed all over the 
world, in a certain stage of human culture, that the soul could 
go away and come back, or that another soul could take 
possession. It was believed — Cicero teaches it, Philo 
teaches it, all of them teach it — that, when the soul goes off 
in a dream, the scenes which pass through the person's mind, 
the conversations it engages in, are just as real as any event 
of waking life. They had no idea of the philosophy of 
dreaming; and, if a man fell asleep, and during that sleep 
had a talk with a neighbor, and told when he waked up that 
he had seen such an one, and had had such a conversation 
with him, they believed that it had really happened. It is 
perfectly natural then that out of this should spring the 
idea of possession by another spirit. For example, a person 
is seized with a fit of epilepsy and falls into a swoon and 
goes through certain motions, or, as in delirium, carries on 
conversation with others. When he comes out of it, he is 
told that he said so and so, or did such things ; and he very 
frankly replies, " No, I did not say it, I did not do it." He 
has no memory, no consciousness of it. It was the most 
natural thing that they should have thought that such a 
person had been taken possession of by another will, by a 
disembodied spirit, and, while in this condition, the spirit 
had made him do these things, and had thus talked through 
him. 

It takes only one more step to say that in this way we can 
get divine revelations ; and people who were susceptible to 
these influences, people who were easily wrought upon, 



The Prophets. 7 1 

nervous persons, who had a tendency toward any of these 
peculiar psychological phases of development, who were 
inclined to hysterics and epilepsy, — these, as we know, were 
the ones who were sought out to serve as priests and medi- 
ums between this world and the next. 

You are aware perhaps that among barbaric peoples, 
among the North American Indians, among the Arabs still, 
among all people in that stage of culture, that an insane man 
is looked on as inspired, and he is treated with the utmost 
tenderness and care. His words are watched as though 
instinct with divine meaning, or, if not inspired by a good 
being, they think possessed by a bad being. All through 
the New Testament, down through almost the entire history 
of the Catholic Church, this belief in demoniacal possession 
is very apparent ; and the business of the exorcist, or one 
capable of driving the spirit out, was one of the most im- 
portant functions exercised by the priesthood. 

Here, then, we have the root of all the traditional beliefs 
concerning divine possession, prophecy, revelation through 
another. 

These prophets of the Old Testament back in the time of 
Baalam, Samuel, past Elijah till we come to Isaiah, and the 
grandest development of prophetic life among the Jews, all 
believed that they were taken possession of by the spirit, and 
that they were speaking not their own words, but the words 
of this indwelling power, which for the time being had sub- 
dued their own aptitudes and faculties, and simply used them 
for this purpose. 

I do not wish you to understand that, because I have 
given you thus the root of prophecy, I have not the 
highest and noblest feeling of respect toward the grandest 
fruits and noblest outcome of it in Hebrew history. It is 
nothing against astronomy that it had its beginning in astrol- 



72 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ogy. It is nothing against chemistry that it had its begin- 
ning in alchemy. It is nothing against any of the grand 
scientific developments of the world that all human culture, 
if traced down, finds its roots in crudeness, in ignorance, in 
senseless speculations. The function of prophecy among 
the Hebrews was one of the grandest, in its higher develop- 
ments, that has ever been seen in the history of any religion 
on the face of the earth. The prophet was the tribune of 
the people, standing between the tyrant and the wronged, 
lifting up his voice for the noblest ethics and the grandest 
religious ideas of his time. It is indeed true that the 
earlier prophets did not teach the morality which we should 
expect of the leading teachers of to-day, but they taught the 
highest of their age. It is true that many of the earlier 
prophets were not monotheists. They believed in a great 
many gods. They worshipped images of Yahveh in the 
high places. Elisha and Elijah were not monotheists. They 
lived in the northern kingdom, after it was separated from 
Judah. The first thing the leader of the northern kingdom 
did was to set up two golden oxen, images of Yahveh, — for 
God was worshipped at this time under the images of these 
golden calves, — as other people worshipped their gods under 
some other form. These great laws against idolatry were 
developed a long time after David and Elijah and Elisha. 
It was a later outcome of the religious development ot the 
people. They worshipped Yahveh under these images. 
They were not scandalized at idol worship, and that the 
symbols of the worship of some other god stood right along- 
side their own : only they felt that Yahveh was their special 
God, and they recognized him as supreme. 

We look back at these prophets, and, thrown into shadow 
by their sides or leading up to them, we see the indis- 
tinct outline of other prophets who have been forgotten. 



The Prophets, 73 

They, in their time, were believed in as much as Elijah or 
Elisha. As time goes by, it sifts and gleans the gold from 
the sand ; and as we look back, down the ages, we fix our 
minds on Elisha, Elijah, Samuel, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, those 
great men. Why ? Not because they were believed in 
chiefly by the people of their time, but because they really 
were the men who stood for the highest and grandest things 
of their age ; and the others were pronounced, after the age 
had gone by, to be false prophets, because it had been 
proved by experience that the things they stood for and 
taught were not the highest truth of the time. The process 
of selection was as natural as that by which we take out 
Abraham Lincoln and Gov. Andrew as the ones that best 
represented the ideas that experience shows were the highest 
and truest of their time, those to which victory was given, 
and which have been made the dominant ones of the age. 

These people, then, did a grand service for Israel. It is 
these prophets that we have to thank for the highest and 
finest outflowering of the religious life of the people ; and 
the idea which they represented was higher than any relig- 
ious development that the world had then seen. When Jesus 
said God is to be worshipped, not in this particular place or 
that, but in spirit and in truth, because he is spirit, he was 
only echoing the grandest sayings of Micah and Isaiah and 
Ezekiel. They taught this grand spiritual religion. They 
stand as representatives and prophets of monotheism to all 
coming time. We shall not be able to get any higher, 
sweeter notions of religion than some which they taught. 
All we can do is to take the germ, develop and apply it 
broadly over human society. When Micah says, "What 
doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly, and to love 
mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ?" he has given us 
as fine a definition as the world has yet attained. We can- 



74 Beliefs about the Bible. 

not improve the definition : all we can do is to live it out. 
There is one other point as important as any of which 
I have treated, and that is the question whether the prophets 
did ever foretell things that were to come to pass in the far dis- 
tant future in such a way as to indicate that they had anything 
in the way of supernatural knowledge. I answer in one 
word, No. There is no proof whatever that the prophets 
had any supernatural knowledge of the future in any degree 
beyond that of any shrewd observer of the forces at work 
in his time, who has learned to understand that every 
condition is a cause that must be followed by its natural 
effect. Let me take up two or three typical examples, that 
I may show you how true this is. It is commonly said that 
Jeremiah prophesied that the Jews would go into captivity 
for seventy years, and then return. He does make that 
prophecy, but it was not fulfilled. It is common to say that 
it was ; but they reach the fulfilment by doctoring the facts, 
by fixing an arbitrary time for the beginning and an arbitrary 
time for the ending of the period. In that way, they can 
reach to about sixty-six years. They say that that is near 
enough, and call it seventy years ; but it is a purely arbitrary 
process, and is beneath the notice of any intelligent and 
respectable critic. 

Again, Ezekiel in the twenty-sixth chapter makes a definite 
prophecy that Tyre, on the eastern shore of the Mediter- 
ranean, was to be conquered by Nebuchadnezzar and his 
army. It was to be utterly destroyed, so that the bare 
rock on which it was built was to be a place for the spread- 
ing of nets by the fishermen. The city of Tyre has been 
destroyed, and there is not much left but the bare rocks ; and 
the fishermen have probably spread their nets a great many 
times on them since that day. But the critical point is that 
it was not done by Nebuchadnezzar, nor for a great many 






The Prophets, 75 

years after his time. It was really destroyed by Alexander 
the Great, when going East for the conquest of Persia. 
So this prophecy was not fulfilled. 

Take that prophecy supposed to be connected with the 
New Testament and the development of Christianity. Isaiah 
says, A virgin shall conceive and bring forth a son, and 
his name shall be called Immanuel. Then, it goes on to 
say that, before this child grows to be old enough to distin- 
guish good from evil, a definite event, which is close at 
hand, shall happen. This prophecy has been always applied 
to Jesus, and it has been supposed to be a confirmation of 
the most stupendous miracle of history. In the first place, 
Isaiah does not say anything about a virgin : he simply says 
a young woman. For all that the word means in the 
original, she might have been married half a dozen times. 
Then, it is definitely stated that the event which is to take 
place is not in any far distant future. It is to occur before 
the child shall be old enough to know good from evil. 
It is only a faith so blind that it will not see, that dares, in 
the face of modern scholarship, to bring up a case like this 
as an example of a prophecy relating to a far distant event, 
and to claim that it has been fulfilled. 

I say then, in general terms, that there is not a single case 
in the Old Testament of a distinct and definite prophecy of 
a distant event, where there is satisfactory proof that it was 
ever fulfilled. The prophets themselves did not claim to 
exercise any such power of foretelling events. 

What did they do ? They did just what any of us can do 
in a measure. If, for example, I should examine a railroad 
bridge, and find one of the abutments or piers was crum- 
bling, and that with every train that went over it it grew 
weaker and weaker, it would not take any supernatural 
knowledge to say that some day the bridge would fall, and 



j6 Beliefs about the Bible. 

involve ruin and disaster. If I were to see that there was 
a growing hatred of France on the part of Germany, and a 
growing power in Germany to accumulate money, to equip 
and train magnificent armies, and if, by and by, something 
should happen to give Germany the opportunity it desired 
to declare a war with France, it would not require supernat- 
ural knowledge to prophesy desolation as the result. If I 
see any one of you breaking the laws of health, it does not 
need divine inspiration to foretell the sequel. 

These prophets then foretold that, unless people repented 
and forsook their evil ways, such and such calamities would 
naturally and necessarily follow ; and this grew out of their 
belief that God was a sovereign who loved righteousness, 
and would not suffer his laws to be permanently disobeyed. 
This is the sum of what is genuine and worthy your notice 
among the prophecies of the Old Testament. 

I want to give you one or two illustrations outside of the 
Bible, to show you that there is no need of supernatural aid 
to foretell some things which are very startling. Look at 
the prophecies of Lord Chesterfield, of Arthur Young, 
of William Cobbett, of Heine, of David G. Crowley. If 
they had been in the Old Testament, they would have been 
picked out as those of the most astonishing nature. They 
are more definite in their terms, and more completely ful- 
filled, than anything that the Bible anywhere contains. 
Lord Chesterfield was that famous dandy, a writer and 
thinker of a certain sort, a person of whom some one once 
said that he would have been a philosopher, if the universe 
had been a drawing-room ; a man of no character, one far 
from the ideal of a prophet. He prophesied, long before 
the time, the coming of the French Revolution. Arthur 
Young, a traveller and shrewd thinker and observer, prophe- 
sied the same thing, when no one in Europe dreamed of its 



The Prophets, 77 

possibility. William Cobbett did a more wonderful thing. 
He was a farmer of marked ability, a good thinker, a writer 
of good English. At the very beginning of this century, he 
prophesied the secession of the Southern States. David G. 
Crowley, in a magazine which was published in New York in 
1872, — which is no longer published, — prophesied the great 
panic which swept over this country and ruined so many 
business men. He went so far as to say that this would 
probably be precipitated by the failure of the Northern 
Pacific Railroad and the bankers connected with it. But 
the most remarkable prophecies of the modern world are 
those of Heine, the German poet, a man of whom it has been 
said that he read all the sanctities of morals and religion 
backward, a man who was bitter, cynical, malevolent toward 
his enemies, ungrateful to his friends, thoughtless, sarcastic ; 
not a man that would be supposed to be selected by the 
Supreme Being as a medium of prophecy. He prophesied, 
long before Europe and America dreamed of such a thing, 
the war between Germany and France, and that France would 
be utterly overthrown; he spoke of the line of forts which 
Thiers was building around Paris, saying that the enclosing 
army would crush the city like a contracting iron shroud ; 
that the communists would arise in their fury; that they 
would strike at the fine public buildings, and the higher 
developments of science and art ; and that, in the midst of 
great popular disturbances, they would hurl the Vendome 
column to the ground. These are specimens of some sec- 
ular prophets and their work. I venture to say that nothing 
in the sacred literature of the world is so definitely outlined 
and so exactly fulfilled. They were based upon a skilful 
reading of the forces of the world and upon a knowledge of 
the laws of cause and effect. 

Prophecy in Israel at last died out, and was superseded by 



78 Beliefs about the Bible. 

the Law and its interpretations in the synagogues ; and the 
synagogues were the direct predecessors of the Christian 
Church. 

We need not regard it as a loss that there is no power of 
foreseeing the future. It would undoubtedly be to us a 
calamity; and yet we do have the power to read just as much 
of it as we need to know. As Patrick Henry once said, 
No one can read the future, except in the light of the past. 
In the light of that past, tracing the causes and the forces 
that work in human history, we are able to tell the natural 
and necessary results of any forces we choose. Instead of 
this delusive light that comes in the absence of reason, that 
takes possession of the brain, and sweeps away a man's will 
and a man's intelligence, and utters meaningless intimations 
concerning the future, — instead of that, we find to-day God 
and his eternal truth by the development of reason, by its 
broadest use in every department of human life, by humbly 
studying the facts of the universe, and deducing their laws, 
and thus tracing the causes at work that have made the 
present and that are making the future. 



THE WRITINGS. 



Not long after the return of the Jews from captivity, that 
section of the Old Testament which went by the name of 
the Law, the principal part of which was the Pentateuch, 
came into its present condition. It is said that Ezra returned 
from Babylon with the law of the Lord in his hand. Some 
time after this, — perhaps during the fourth century before 
Christ, — the second collection of the Old Testament was 
made, and generally accepted among the people. This sec- 
ond collection went by the name of the Prophets, and it is 
this of which I treated in my last discourse. 

After the Law and the Prophets had been collected, and 
had been received universally by the people, and had acquired 
that character of peculiar sacredness which made them re- 
garded as the very word of God, there still remained a large 
body of miscellaneous writings which had not yet acquired 
this character of sacredness. They were coming, however, 
to be looked upon as having a peculiar, precious character 
or quality, which set them apart from any and all other 
books excepting those which were already accepted in the 
canon. These miscellaneous writings were twelve in number. 
They were the Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Solomon, 
Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther, Daniel, Ezra, 
Nehemiah, and Chronicles. These were the twelve books 
which made up the collection which was called the Writings. 

In the New Testament, when you find the Old Testament 



80 Beliefs about the Bible. 

referred to, it is generally under the name of the Law and 
the Prophets, or the Law and the Prophets and the Psalms. 
Jesus is sometimes represented as using this last phrase. 
Those three terms cover the whole of the Old Testament 
literature, the word " Psalms " being used first as the most 
important part of the collection, and thus giving name to the 
whole. I remember James Freeman Clarke published a vol- 
ume of sermons, in which the name of the first sermon is 
used as the title of the whole book. In just this way, the 
third collection went by the name of the Psalms, because 
it was the first and most important part. 

I shall not be able to go into any minute and critical 
examination of each of these twelve books, for I neither 
have time nor is it necessary for the purpose I have in view. 
My object is to consider the origin, authority, and authen- 
ticity of the books that make up our Bible, so that we may 
understand how we ought to treat them, how much obedi- 
ence we ought to yield to them, and what relation they bear 
to the other great books of the world, what relation they 
bear to the conduct of our daily life. 

It will not be necessary for me to touch at length on many 
of these books. I will only characterize them in a word, and 
concentrate the attention of the morning on three or four of 
chief importance. 

The Chronicles in the Hebrew copy of the . Scriptures 
stood as the very last book, although it has been placed 
before the Prophets in our modern collection. It is a some- 
what loosely written history, derived from the Temple archives 
and historical records, which either were not accessible to 
the writer of Samuel and Kings, or which for one reason or 
another he failed to use. It is of no special importance, 
and need not detain us. 

Daniel has played a very important part in the history of 



The Writings. 8 1 

Christian speculation. It stands, as you know, as the fourth 
of the major prophets, and goes by the name of prophecy. 
During the larger part of the Christian centuries, it has been 
understood that it was written by Daniel himself during his 
captivity in Babylon, and that it is a distinct prophecy con- 
cerning great future events which, in majestic figure and 
vision, are outlined and foreshadowed. Yet the Book of 
Daniel, as a matter of fact, was the very last one which the 
Jews received into their canon. Instead of having been writ- 
ten in the sixth century, it was written probably in the second 
century, during the time of some of the Jewish wars, per- 
haps under the tyranny of Antiochus, with the purpose of 
encouraging the people in times of very great oppression. 
Yet this book has been characterized in all earnestness as 
a " pious fraud," meaning by that not what we should mean, 
were that term used to characterize any modern composition. 
The writer of Daniel had no idea of doing anything wrong. 
He believed he was justified in the work in which he was 
engaged. He was an earnest lover and friend of his people, 
and desired to comfort them, and strengthen their hearts 
and hands in the great conflict in which they were engaged, 
to keep them patient until they should be victorious and 
reorganized. He writes this book, and attributes its author- 
ship to Daniel, a person who lived some hundreds of years 
before. He thought, by sending it out under the authority 
of this great name, it might speedily take hold of the popu- 
lar mind and heart, and produce the desired effect. Yet 
this book has been the one to which the Second Adventists 
have appealed. A book from whose mystical figures people 
have dared to read the future, year after year and age after 
age, dealing with "a time, times, and a half," with the big 
horn and the little horn, and with the beasts, in their en- 
deavor to picture the future course and destiny of nations. 



82 Beliefs about the Bible, 

You will judge from the time when the book was written 
how very little profit there has been in this kind of specula- 
tion. 

Esther is a very peculiar book, one that the Jews long 
looked at askance before receiving it into their canon. It is 
marked by the fact that it does not contain the name of 
God, and has no religious character about it whatever. The 
Jews, while they were in captivity, adopted a feast called the 
Purim, which became one of their most famous feasts, and 
to which they were greatly attached. After the return from 
the captivity, it was difficult to make this feast popular in 
Palestine. Undoubtedly for the purpose of giving a plausi- 
ble Jewish origin to this festival, and to make it acceptable 
to the Palestine Jews, this book was written. At least, such 
is its probable scope and purpose. 

Ruth is a beautiful pastoral idyl, one of the most beauti- 
ful things in the whole Bible. Its whole purpose, so far as 
we can see, and that which made it so dear to the popular 
heart, is the fact that it traces the supposed genealogy and 
origin of David, their favorite king and their ideal national 
hero. 

Lamentations is simply an anonymous book, written in a 
strain of elegy, and mourning over the desolations of the 
people. 

Ezra and Nehemiah, two books, though substantially one, 
give us an account of the history of the revival of the Jewish 
people and the reorganization of their national religion after 
their return from the captivity. 

The Book of Proverbs, supposed to have been written by 
Solomon just as it stands, indicates on its surface that it has 
a divided authorship. The last chapter, it is said, was 
written by the mother of King Lemuel, another by Agur. 
Whole chapters throughout the book are not proverbs at 



The Writings. 83 

all, but ethical treatises, containing advice from one who 
has been through life and learned its temptations and mean- 
ing. They could not have been written by Solomon or by 
any one man. Many of the proverbs are not even of Jewish 
origin. But the tendency to attribute such a book to a 
particular author is perfectly natural. As if to-day I should 
make a collection of prudential maxims such as Poor 
Richard made himself famous for, and entitle it Maxims 
by Benjamin Franklin and others, and the book should 
grow and additions be made to it, it would be easy for the 
popular mind to think that he was the author of them all. 
People would cease to make any distinction between his 
maxims and the others. They would quote these maxims 
as though all belonged to Poor Richard's sayings. In this 
way, the Book of Proverbs has probably grown. Solomon 
had a great reputation among his people for shrewd observa- 
tion, for wise and witty sayings. He was skilled and 
experienced in interpreting riddles and solving problems 
of nature and of life ; and he came to stand in their minds 
as a representative proverb-maker, and tradition associates 
his name with this collection. This tendency is perfectly 
natural. You constantly hear people quoting sayings from 
Sydney Smith which may possibly have been familiar to 
ancient Rome or Greece, or perhaps may have originated 
last year in a Western newspaper, but attributed to him, 
because he is the representative wit of the English people ; 
and it is safe to suppose that anything witty of which the 
origin is not known was originated by him. 

Let us now concentrate our attention on the four most 
important books in this collection called The Writings. 

First, the collection of Psalms, the Psalms of David, as 
they are popularly called. I used to suppose, and probably 
most of you were taught to believe, that, in spite of the faci 



84 Beliefs about the Bible. 

that the sons of Korah and the name of Moses and other 
names are given as the composers of some of these psalms, 
yet David was the writer of them all. This, I say, is the 
popular idea that has been in the minds of the people for 
centuries. 

What is this Book of Psalms ? It is nothing more nor 
less than the Jewish hymn-book. It is the hymn-book of 
the second temple ; that is, the temple built under the aus- 
pices of Ezra and Nehemiah on the return of the Jews from 
their captivity in Babylon. As we examine the book, we 
find it divided into five different sections or separate classes 
of hymns or psalms. The first reaches from the second to 
the forty-first psalm ; the second, from the forty-second 
to the seventy- second ; the third, from the seventy-third to 
the eighty-ninth ; the fourth, from the ninetieth to the one 
hundred and sixth; the fifth, from the one hundred and 
seventh to the one hundred and forty-ninth. You will 
notice that I say nothing about the first or last psalms. 
The first was added after the general collection was made 
as a sort of general introduction, and in the old Jewish 
psalm-book the second psalm counted as the first. The 
one hundred and fiftieth psalm was added as an epilogue to 
the general collection. So there were originally only one 
hundred and forty-eight psalms. You will find the second 
psalm quoted in the New Testament; and, although our 
translators have made Jesus quote from the second, in the 
original Greek he quotes from the first, because that was 
originally the first. 

These five books were collected at five different times. I 
need not go critically into this. The first book, either par- 
tially or entirely, was brought together and was in use dur- 
ing the service of the first temple, the temple of Solomon. 
In this first book, if anywhere, we must look for some of the 



The Writings, 85 

poetic work of King David; for, after that first book, you 
will probably find none of his work at all. As you look at 
these psalms, you will see that they have various headings, 

— such as "A Psalm of David," or "David's confidence in 
God's grace," or " David praiseth God for his deliverance," 

— but you are to remember as you read them that these are 
no part of the original work at all. All these headings and 
notes are the work of editors, and not of the poetical authors 
themselves. If you look back to your childhood, you can 
remember how you used to hear the minister in the pulpit, 
or your father at morning worship, reading, as though they 
were a part of the inspired Psalm, certain detached words 
which we now know to be a sort of musical notation. It is 
as though, when reading the hymn, I should read the words 
andante, fortissimo, — Italian words for the guidance of the 
musicians. So certain words, such as Selah and Higgaion, 
are simply indications to the singers as to how the music 
should be performed, whether with accompaniment of instru- 
ments or by voices alone, whether high or low, etc. 

Now, a word in regard to temple music, that you may 
understand something as to how these hymns were used. 
Some were used only for special occasions, as on festivals, — 
as we have our Easter and Christmas hymns, suitable only to 
those occasions. Others formed part of the general service. 
It is stated in one place in the Bible that they had some 
four thousand singers. That is probably a larger number 
than was permanently attached to the temple. They had, 
however, between two and three hundred men and women 
engaged in the temple singing. The idea that the women 
must be shut off in a gallery by themselves apart from the 
men was not a part of the Old Testament idea of service. 
It is a more modern notion. There were then between 
two and three hundred voices. These were accompanied 



86 Beliefs about the Bible, 

generally by stringed instruments simply to aid the singers, 
as we are accompanied by the organ to sustain and guide 
and direct the multitude of our voices. If you think of the 
three hundred men and women's voices, with lyres and harps, 
and now and then cymbals to mark the time, as we use them 
to-day, you will have a very good idea of the temple choir, as 
they performed their daily and Sabbath services. Only you 
must not think of them as singing as we do ; for harmony, or 
the blending of the different parts of the song in one gen- 
eral effect, is a modern thing in music, and was unknown to 
the ancient Hebrews. They had no poetry in the sense in 
which we use that word, perfect in rhythm, time, and rhyme. 
Theirs was perfect only in alliteration and rhythm, or meas- 
ure. There was no rhyme. Their singing was more like a 
chant than anything we call harmonic music : they sang only 
melody. 

These five books, then, that make up the Psalms, were col- 
lected at different times by different editors. They came at 
last to be looked on as chiefly the work of David. How did 
this idea arise ? In several ways. 

Suppose I should make a collection of hymns. I might 
take, as a basis, " Watts and Select." If by and by that 
book passes out of use, and somebody else makes a collec- 
tion, and carelessly marks all taken from "Watts and 
Select" as simply "Watts," meaning the collection and not 
that he was the author, when by and by " Watts and Select " 
should be entirely lost, many would suppose that Watts was 
the author of all the hymns bearing his name in the last 
collection. And remember that in those old times there 
was no printing, and no chance for people to correct errors 
by comparison. In this way, therefore, many of the old 
psalms that formed part of the Davidic collection, which 
was formed for the first temple, were transferred to the later 



The Writings. 8? 

books, and were therefore thought to have been written by 
David. 

It is absurd to suppose that he wrote many. Let me indi- 
cate a few reasons why he could not have done so. I take 
one of the Psalms, for example, with reference to the temple 
worship. Of course, David did not refer to that. There was 
no temple in existence until after he was dead. If joy and 
love in temple worship were expressed, it was written by 
some one who lived after there was a temple. 

Take the one hundred and nineteenth psalm, devoted to a 
passionate love and admiration for the law. The law came 
into its present shape after the captivity. Before a person 
could write the one hundred and nineteenth psalm, the law 
.xiust have been familiar to his mind for years and years, 
u„til there could grow up this passionate admiration and love 
for it. It must have been made dear by association. It 
could not have been written until within a few centuries 
before Christ, hundreds of years after David was dead. 

The one hundred and thirty-seventh psalm, beginning, " By 
the riveis of Babylon there we sat down ; yea, we wept, when 
we remembered Zion," must have been written by some one 
who had been in Babylon during the captivity, hundreds of 
years after David was dead. 

How has the popular idea of David arisen ? The people 
have assumed that David wrote the Psalms ; and then they 
have gone to work and created an ideal sort of man, made 
up of the materia is of which the Psalms are composed, and 
they call that Do,vid. That is, they have assumed that he 
wrote the Psalms, and have created an ideal image of such a 
man as would be likely to write such things as these. They 
have made him spiritual, noble, a monotheist, giving the high- 
est worship to God. But look at the outlines of the early part 
of his life. He went into the wilderness at the head of a 



88 Beliefs about the Bible. 

band of cut-throats, murderers, and convicts of every kind, 
and there remained for a certain number of years, until strong 
enough to seize the throne. Then, he is a barbaric leader, a 
man of immense power and force of personality, a man of 
great genius, a man who first welded those conflicting tribes 
into one nation, but no more of a saint than Richard Coeur 
de Lion or Henry VIII. He was cruel and vindictive. He 
worshipped Yahveh ; but he also worshipped Baal, and 
named one of his sons for him. He sacrificed the seven 
sons of Saul to Yahveh ; and, when he conquers the Ammon- 
ites and captures one of their rebellious cities, he puts the 
inhabitants to the severest torture, and burns them alive. 
And he did this to all the captured cities of the Ammonites. 
This is not the kind of man you would think of as writing 
the poetic and beautiful and spiritual lines of many of the 
Psalms, that have been the comfort of souls for hundreds of 
years. You might as well think of Henry VIII. writing a 
treatise against Divorces as to suppose that King David was 
the author of most of the Psalms. The contradiction on 
the face of it is as clear in the one case as in the other. 

How many did he write then ? Instead of giving you my 
own opinion, I will give you the opinion of Prof. Robertson 
Smith, the author of the article on the Bible in the Encyclo- 
pedia Britannica, one of the most eminent Biblical scholars 
in the world. He thinks it would be very critical to say that 
David did not write any. According to his opinion, he may 
have written the eighteenth and the seventh. He thinks ' it 
is probable he wrote them. 

The Psalms, however, whoever wrote them, do not depend 
upon their authorship for their power and beauty. They 
range from the highest lyrical poetry in the world to mechan- 
ical verse without any trace of inspiration. Some are 
acrostics : the writer begins every line with a certain letter 



The Writings. 89 

of the Jewish alphabet. But there are others that bubble 
up like springs that have their source at the very heart of 
the world, full of life and sun and joy forever. Some of the 
Psalms, however, derive a great part of their wealth from 
association. A Cremona violin is not so valuable when first 
constructed. After it has been used for years and years,, 
after it has expressed the joy and sorrow of the world, until 
these have been wrought into it, so that it seems as though 
it had a soul of its own, then it becomes a valuable instru- 
ment, — valuable because of these stored-up vibrations, and 
worthy of the touch of the grandest master. Precisely so 
these Psalms have been played upon by human sympathies 
and hopes and fears and imaginations for centuries, until 
they are permeated and colored all the way through by the 
passionate joy and the passionate sorrow of the human 
heart. 

As an illustration how association changes the very inter- 
pretation of the passage itself, take that familiar one, " Oh ? 
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. " How sweet 
and fine this thought ! — the beauty of holiness, representing 
a state of culture that is looked on as ideal beauty. Does 
the author mean that ? If I should give you the original 
meaning, all the spiritual aspiration goes out of it. The 
writer simply says, I will worship the Lord in the beauty of 
consecrated garments, with beautiful robes and ritual. But 
you will never get that idea back into it again ; for the heart 
of the world has written over that line, and filled it with 
spiritual meaning. So a large part of the wealth of the 
Psalms is not what the writer put into them, but what the 
experience of the world has written between the lines. 

The Song of Solomon is generally spoken of apologet- 
ically. It was a long time after it was written before it was 
introduced into the canon. As it stands, it is the oldest 



90 Beliefs about the Bible. 

book probably in Hebrew literature. It was after the time 
of Christ before it was admitted as a sacred book. It was 
cherished in the heart of the people, but they could not get 
over the fact that it did not appear to be at all religious. 
They could not find any reason for admitting it to the canon, 
until at last Rabbi Akiba, a man of overmastering influence, 
said that the whole world was not worth the day on which 
that song was given to Israel ; and that fact, together with 
the idea that it was attributed to Solomon, settled the ques- 
tion, and it was admitted. The probability is that Solomon 
had nothing to do with it. It is sometimes charged with 
being an obscene and impure book. There is not a more 
beautiful or pure poem on the face of the earth. What 
does it teach ? What is its moral ? It is a dramatic poem, 
or as near that as the Jewish genius ever attained, and rep- 
resents a beautiful country maiden, who is betrothed to a 
shepherd lad, enduring the blandishments of the courtiers 
who are endeavoring to lure her from her country lover, and 
make her the chief figure in the royal harem. In spite of 
all these blandishments of the gay court and city, she resists, 
and remains true to her rustic lover, and at last is permitted 
to go back to her friends, her home, and her love. That 
is the moral. If any one can find anything impure in that, 
they could question the purity of a rose in a glass vase on 
the parlor table. There is nothing particularly religious in 
this book except this undying faithfulness. Yet the heart 
of it is true from beginning to end. But do you suppose 
Solomon would sit down deliberately and write a song in 
which he would delineate his discomfiture, and set forth 
how he tried to woo and w r in a country maiden, and could 
not succeed, but had to let her go back to her country lover 
again ? People who go through with that experience do not 
usually set it forth in songs of that fashion. With this 



The Writings. 9 1 

conception, the song is beautiful from beginning to end. 
Let us pass to Ecclesiastes. This is also one of the last 
books admitted to the canon. It came in with a great deal 
of difficulty, and probably would never have been admitted, 
had it not been that Solomon was supposed to be the author. 
His name floated it, so tha.t it kept on the surface of Jewish 
thought; and we may be thankful for the kind of half- 
fraud which gave his name to the book, because it is an 
intensely interesting specimen of ancient literature. The 
writer says, " I, the Preacher, was king over Israel in Jeru- 
salem." Take that last phrase. When Solomon was king, 
there was no king anywhere else except in Jerusalem. Why 
should he say that he was king in Jerusalem ? If a Presi- 
dent of the United States should speak of himself, he would 
not say, when I was President in Washington. There is no 
president elsewhere : why specify it in that fashion ? But, in 
later times, there was another king at Samaria ; and it would 
be natural for a person in a subsequent period to use such 
an expression. Again, Solomon would be likely to use the 
present tense. He was king all the time until he died. He 
would not write of himself in the past. Again, the writer 
refers to Judea as a province. It was not a province for 
hundreds of years after the time of Solomon. If you know 
the character of the book, you will see with what difficulty it 
must have been admitted. There is little religious in it. 
It is pessimistic to the last degree, hopeless of this world, 
despairing of human society, hopeless of the future. The 
writer is a fatalist. He says that the world is all vanity and 
vexation of spirit ; that there is nothing in human life ; that 
a person who is dead is better than one living, and one not 
born better than either of them ; that the whole world is 
empty, one endless round of vanity and vexation. If a 
person is rich, has many gardens and much increase, he 



92 Beliefs about the Bible. 

becomes satiated and tired of it all, and disgusted with life 
in any form. Animals and man are about on the same 
level : the same things happen to both ; there is no future 
for either. It is very curious, as Mr. Chadwick has observed 
in a lecture on this subject, that a passage from this book 
intimating that there is no future life is placed over the 
entrance to Mt. Auburn : — " Then shall the dust return to 
the earth as it was, and the spirit shall return to God who 
gave it." To any one familiar with Oriental thought, this 
simply means that the body goes back to the dust, and the 
spirit, that spark that we call life, goes back and loses its 
personality, is absorbed in the infinite God from whom it 
came. That is what that passage means. Thus, the Book 
of Ecclesiastes was put into the Jewish canon, and became 
a part of the Bible of Christendom, although it explicitly 
denies every tenet of Christianity. The name of Solomon 
floated it in. But, dreary as it is, it represents a phase of 
human life that finds its echo in the world to-day. It is 
only fair, however, to say that the last two verses contain 
a sentiment so noble as to redeem much that is vastly 
inferior. 

Let us now consider perhaps the greatest book in the Old 
Testament, Job. When was this written ? It is supposed 
that it was written somewhere in the neighborhood of the 
seventh century. It is an attempt on the part of the writer 
to consider the oldest and the newest problem of humanity, 
perennial in its interest, mighty in its hold on the thoughts 
and hopes and fears of man. He considers the question 
why it is that good men suffer, why they are in sorrow and 
trouble, why they are overthrown and cast down, why it is, 
if there is a righteous government of the universe, that there 
is no certain prosperity for virtue and truth ; that, in spite of 
the good man's endeavors to do right, he may be cast down 



The Writings. 93 

to earth, and trampled under the feet of tyranny, selfishness, 
and wrong. You will see the nature of the problem to the 
Jew, when you remember that it was the fundamental idea 
of his religion that Yahveh was a God of righteousness who 
would reward the virtuous. As they expressed it, " I have 
never seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging 
bread " ; though I could never help feeling that the writer of 
that verse had had a narrow experience of life. 

The Jews at this time had no real faith in any future life. 
There are no intimations of it until toward the very last, 
and then they are dim and indefinite. They teach that God 
will reward the righteous with long life, with health, with 
friends, with many children, all the elements of prosperity. 
That is the reward for serving Yahveh. Yet, in the face of 
this, they saw the righteous suffering. It was the solution of 
this problem that was in the mind of the great thinker who 
wrote this book. It was probably written not long after 
the death of Josiah, somewhere about 641. He was the 
king above all others who was their ideal for righteousness 
and truth, devotion and service to Yahveh. The prophets 
had long been saying that, when they should have a king 
true to the law, who should put down idolatry, who should 
serve Yahveh, they would have prosperity and victory over 
their enemies. Here, then, was a king faithful and true, 
from first to last, putting down idolatry, lifting up the law, 
bringing only good to Israel, yet killed in mid career, and 
his people overthrown. No wonder that this great loving 
heart and grand poetic brain, the author of Job, should be 
stunned and amazed at seeing all his old ideas put to rout. 
What does it mean ? Does Yahveh really rule and care for 
the world ? If he does, why does he permit such contradic- 
tion in human affairs ? This is the problem. You remem- 
ber the introduction, where Satan is represented as appearing 



94 Beliefs about the Bible. 

before God. The Persian influence had not at that time 
affected the Jewish belief, and Satan had not developed into 
a hater of God. He has access to the very court of God 
himself, and even talks with the Lord on his throne. This 
introductory scene may very likely have been written by 
other hands : it does not settle the wonderful problem any- 
way. It sets forth how Job is suddenly overthrown. It lets 
us in behind the scenes, and lets us hear the partial solu- 
tion, though it is not what we should regard as a solution 
to-day. 

The book is dialogue in form, and is made up of conversa- 
tions between Job and the three friends whom he calls mis- 
erable comforters, and an interpolated speech of Elihu. 
Then, Jehovah himself speaks. The speech of Elihu inter- 
rupts the dialogue, but it does not give the solution of the 
problem. Does the whole book settle the question ? Does 
it give us any answer to this great problem ? Not at all. 
We face the mystery overhanging the world from the begin- 
ning until now. When Yahveh appears himself, and speaks 
out of the whirlwind, what does he say ? He does not give 
any explanation. You have no right to question God. You 
must bow and submit : that is the only solution which the 
writer could discover. As one of the Psalmists says, " I was 
dumb : I opened not my mouth because thou didst it." The 
Book of Job does not carry us any further. 

Have we discovered anything to throw light on that prob- 
lem since ? Only this : it seems to me that the theory of 
evolution hints an answer such as the world has never dis- 
covered before, and which, to my mind, is more rational than 
any attempted solutions that have been offered. Why do 
we suffer ? I do not believe we suffer in order to test us, 
because the Almighty and Satan have entered into a contro- 
versy whether we will cling to him, if he puts us to trial. I 



The Writings. 95 

do not believe we suffer because God appoints this or that 
amount of pain to us on account of something we have done ; 
as I heard a tender-hearted mother saying, " Oh, what have 
I done that God has taken my child away ? " I reject that 
whole conception of the government of the world. I do not 
believe that God, because a mother does not go to church, 
or because she loves her child too much, out of jealousy 
sends diphtheria or scarlet fever to put the little child to 
■ death as a punishment to her. It seems to me infernal, this 
conception of God. I could not love a Being like that. 

What does modern science tell us ? Simply this : that we 
are surrounded on every hand by a great natural order ; that 
we are a part of it ; that life and health and happiness 
come as the result of our conformity to this law and order. 
If I keep the laws of my physical life I am well, if I break 
them I am sick • and neither praying nor cursing has any- 
thing to do with the question whether poison is wholesome 
or bread is injurious. Pain is a signal marked " Danger," set 
up along our pathway on every hand. If we step from this 
pathway, consciously or unconsciously ; if we break a law vol- 
untarily or by the force of inheritance, — pain, disease, death, 
come as necessity. Pain means broken law. Welfare and 
happiness mean law kept ; and the result of this is to teach 
us progressively through the ages to know and keep the laws 
of the universe, in which are life and peace forevermore. 



The Bridge between tie Testaments. 



As you open any one of our common Bibles, you will find 
that there is a break between the Old Testament and the 
New which has been filled by the binder with only the blank 
leaves for a family record. This break has been, in the 
popular mind, a blank for hundreds of years, as much so as 
the unwritten leaves. Yet something of vast moment must 
have happened between the closing of the Old Testament 
and the beginning of the New, which we must understand 
in order to appreciate the movements which are so alive on 
the scene of the New Testament record. This break is no 
slight one, as you will see when your attention is called to 
the dates. The date of the prophecy of Malachi is placed 
in the Bible, in the margin, as 397 B.C. That is, our Bible 
gives us the impression that the Old Testament closed 
nearly four hundred years before the New Testament began. 
If you ascertain the date of the first writings of the New 
Testament, you will find it was somewhere between fifty and 
sixty years after the birth of Christ. Here is a gulf appar- 
ently of four hundred and fifty years between the Old Testa- 
ment and the New. It was years, in my own case, before I 
had looked up this matter enough to have any comprehen- 
sion of what had been taking place during those centuries 
which must have united these two periods of time. In 
order that you may see how important must have been the 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 97 

activities going on, I shall ask you to note two or three par- 
ticularly marked things. 

When the Old Testament closed, there was no trace any- 
where of any belief, on the part of the Jews, in any doctrine 
of immortality, in any heaven or hell. The New Testament 
is full of both. There was no trace anywhere, at the end of 
Malachi, of any developed doctrine of angels, good or bad. 
The New Testament is full of the hierarchies of good angels, 
under their leader, and, over against them, the hierarchies of 
bad angels, under the fully developed Satan, or Devil. When 
we have finished the Old Testament, we have learned nothing 
about any kingdom of heaven, or kingdom of God, as to be 
expected very soon on the earth. The very first cry that 
meets us as we open the New Testament is, " The kingdom of 
God is at hand." When the Old Testament closes, there are 
almost no traces anywhere of an immediate expectation of 
the Messiah. The New Testament seems to begin with the 
Messianic cry in the hearts and on the lips of all the people. 
So the words "grace" and "sin" and the idea of the atone- 
ment, and all these things with which the New Testament is 
filled, had found no clear and definite expression at the close, 
or what was supposed to be the close, of the Old Testament 
record. 

But there is danger of our having an entire misconception 
of the facts, if we suppose that there is really a very long 
break between the records of the Old and New Testaments. 
A large part of this misconception comes from the mistakes 
that have been made in regard to the dates of the records. 
For example, the Old Testament canon was not closed 397 
B.C., although this is the popularly regarded date of the 
prophecy of Malachi. As a matter of fact, the Old Testa- 
ment canon was not closed until after the destruction of the 
temple, nearly a hundred years after the birth of Christ; and 



98 Beliefs about the Bible, 

it was closed at this time, not because all those books which 
were regarded as worthy to be reckoned in its number had 
been included, but because the destruction of the temple 
and the dispersion of the Jews among the peoples, as the 
result of their conquest by the Romans, made it impossible 
for them any longer to carry on this religious and literary 
activity. Only those books, then, which had become sacred 
in the minds of the people at the time of the destruction of 
their nationality, were looked upon as belonging to the old 
and sacred period of their history, and about them gathered 
this halo of antiquity and respect which always belongs to 
those things which are revered as part of a nation's past. 

The Book of Malachi was not the last of the Old Testa- 
ment. Several of those books which are included in the 
canon date long after the prophecy of Malachi. The Book 
of Daniel, of Ecclesiastes, and several others, were of more 
recent date than that prophecy. 

There is a large body of literature, the name of which you 
may be familiar with, that has not been included in either 
the Old Testament or the New by Protestant Christianity, 
although a part has been accepted by the Catholic Church, 
which fills up this apparent gulf between the two Testaments. 
This literature shows a development of religious and politi- 
cal life among the Jews, and explains what must otherwise 
be a great mystery. A part of this literature goes under the 
name of apocalyptic writings, and a part under the name of 
apocryphal writings. Apocryphal means hidden, and apoca- 
lyptic means just the opposite, unfolded or revealed. The 
apocalyptic literature was so named, because it was supposed 
in some way to lift the veil which hides the future, and in a 
series of shadowy outlines to picture the great events that 
were to come. The writers of these visions did not expose 
themselves to detection by being over-definite in drawing the 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 99 

outlines of coming events. They Lave written them in so 
cloudy and indefinite a fashion that it has been a question 
with interpreters in all ages as to whether this precise picture 
or that was supposed to refer to one historic event or another. 

The apocryphal literature would be well worthy an hour's 
study in your presence, had we time. A large part of it is 
so very noble, so splendidly written, so full of fine ideas, that 
it can only be the result of an accident that it is not a part 
of the Old Testament itself. 

I intimated that the canon was closed suddenly by the 
destruction of the Jewish nationality, and that, but for this, 
the Book of Ecclesiasticus, the Wisdom of Solomon, the 
histories of the Maccabees, and others of these powerful 
works, would undoubtedly have appeared in the Old Tes- 
tament canon. As we study these books, there is no reason 
that we can see why they should not have been included, so 
far as we can judge of their intrinsic worth. They are cer- 
tainly much superior to some parts of the Old Testament. 
Some parts of Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon 
are quite equal to anything that goes by the name of sacred 
Scripture in any of the religious writings of the world. 

We cannot admit, of course, that this apparent break be- 
tween the Testaments is a real cessation of Jewish life, activ- 
ity, and development. We are now accustomed to the 
modern word "evolution," to a belief in the continuity of 
growth, — that nothing happens suddenly, or without a cause, 
or springs full-grown out of nothing. 

If, for example, we had no history of this country from 
the time when the Pilgrims landed until the Boston harbor 
"tea-party" or the battle of Lexington, — if it was all un- 
written, so that we left off with their landing at Plymouth, 
and began again at the beginning of the Revolution, — we 
should have no sort of doubt or question as to whether there 



ioo Beliefs about the Bible. 

had been most intense political and intellectual activity on 
the part of the people during this time. We should have to 
assume a line of continuous development from one point 
to the other. Precisely the same is true concerning the his- 
tory and development of the Jews. We cannot understand 
the beginning of the New Testament life and literature, 
unless we assume an intense activity on the part of the Jews 
during this period, which is not covered by that which we are 
accustomed to call sacred literature. 

There are two possible courses open to me this morning. 
I could take up this apocalyptic and apocryphal literature, 
and outline it, giving you specimens of its contents, analyze 
them, show what these writers were thinking about, and point 
out their effect on the popular life ; but this would lead me 
too far and into too minute details, and would make the sub- 
ject wearisome. On the other hand, I can simply give you 
results. I can tell you what we have learned by studying 
this old history and literature. I can tell you what the Jews 
were doing politically, intellectually, socially, and religiously, 
and in this way enable your thoughts to cross this great 
gulf from the Old Testament to the New. 

Leaving on one side, then, except as I may refer to it inci- 
dentally, this whole mass of literature, I will give you, in as 
brief and clear outline as I can, the history of what the Jews 
were doing during this most important period of their his- 
tory and development. 

In the first place, let me tell you the political vicissitudes 
through which they passed, because these led the way to the 
other changes ; and it is necessary to know them, in order to 
comprehend their later movements. 

When the Jews first returned from the Babylonish captiv- 
ity, they were under a Persian protectorate. That is, these 
exiles returned home by permission of the Persian king, and 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 101 

under the escort and guidance of Persians, protected by Per- 
sian power. They were permitted by Persian authority to 
rebuild their temple, and to renew, as far as possible, their 
old-time life. They were under this power continuously, and 
at peace for a long number of years. They enjoyed practi- 
cal independence during that time. The Persians were so 
far away that the kings did not care to interfere with them, 
and they were allowed to develop according to their own 
ideas. Their chief priest, or high priest, was practically the 
supreme power. Of course, if any conflict arose, the people 
would have the right to appeal to Persia, so that the Persian 
king was the ultimate authority in all political questions ; but, 
practically, the Jews were independent. They remained in 
this way until that young Grecian king, Alexander, started 
in his great career of conquest. On his way to the East, he 
took Jerusalem as one of the great cities in his course, and 
conquered the Judasan power, bringing it to his feet and 
leaving it as one of his subjects, while he went farther east 
to break down the entire Persian rule in all its range. 

After Alexander's death, this great world-wide kingdom 
broke up into four pieces. Judaea fell to the share of Ptol- 
emy, the ruler of Egypt ; and, for a long time, we find Judsea 
a dependency of Egypt. About this time, the great city 
of Alexandria was built as the capital of the Ptolemies. It 
soon became one of the most famous cities of the world, 
the seat of commerce and of literature. It was one of the 
great centres of learning, and exerted an influence throughout 
the world. It was a great cosmopolitan city 7 . Greeks, 
Romans, Jews, Egyptians, Orientals of every name, centred 
here, and formed this great seething, political, intellectual, 
and religious life. It was during the reign of the Ptolemies 
that the Old Testament was translated into the Greek ver- 
sion called the Septuagint. This Greek translation of the 



102 Beliefs about the Bible, 

Old Testament is the one that is always referred to in the 
New Testament, when quotations are made there. So that, 
if you find that these quotations are different from the Old 
Testament, you may understand this difference, by remember- 
ing that they quoted from the Septuagint, which sometimes 
differs in words and phrases from the ordinary reading of the 
Hebrew. 

After the Jews had been under the reign of the Ptolemies 
in Egypt, they passed under a new conqueror, the Syrian 
kings, or dynasty of the Seleucidae, of whom the representa- 
tive at that time was Antiochus Epiphanes, or Antiochus the 
brilliant, who was nicknamed, on account of his strange and 
unaccountable ways, Epimanes, or the madman. He did 
everything he could to denationalize the Jews. He abolished 
their temple worship. He made it obligatory upon every 
Jew to worship the gods of Greece and the gods of Greece 
alone. He did everything he could to pour contempt on 
the temple, even going so far as to sacrifice swine upon the 
altar, the last and extremest indignity, in the eye of a Jew, 
which could be committed against his national worship. 

He not only sacrificed this animal upon the altar of the 
temple, but, making a broth of the remains, he sprinkled it 
over their sacred books and utensils, doing whatever he 
could to defile everything that they called sacred. He 
carried this so far, however, that he defeated the very pur- 
pose he had in view ; for one day, as a renegade Jew was 
about to offer a pagan sacrifice, Mattathias rushed on him 
and slew him. This started a revolution, which ran like 
wild-fire all over the country. It resulted in the Jews attain- 
ing their freedom, and becoming a nation again by them- 
selves. The son of Mattathias, Judas, the Hammer, as he 
was called, became king. He beat his enemies to pieces, 
established a new dynasty, and for many years the Jews 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 103 

ruled themselves, and were independent. But, by and by, they 
formed an alliance with that new power in the West, which 
was so soon destined to rule the whole world. When two 
rival claimants for the Jewish throne were quarrelling as to 
the succession, Rome stepped in, and assumed a protector- 
ate, which meant their subjection; and, from that time on to 
the destruction of the Jewish city, Judaea was only a province 
of the Roman Empire, ruled a part of the time by kings 
appointed in Rome, a part of the time by Roman procurators 
and other officers of the Empire. 

So much for an outline of the political history. You see 
how active were those times concerning which we have known 
so very little, and how and what were the influences at work 
which mingled not only the nationalities, but the philosophies 
and religions of the world in such a way as to prepare for 
the development of a new religion. 

Mark for a moment how these influences were at work. 
Here were brought together, in these great cities of Rome 
and Alexandria, peoples from all over the world, each with 
its own religion, each worshipping its own separate gods. 
And as they grew wiser, and thought more deeply about this 
subject, do you not see how scepticism must have resulted ? 
Whose god was the true one ? Here were a hundred gods ; 
here were many religions represented in these great cities. 
A man could take his choice, and worship this or that ; but 
it was impossible for him to believe in them all. When the 
question was raised, Which one shall I believe in? the 
answer was likely to be, In none. The system each religion 
represented was so vulnerable, the gods were so clearly only 
the idealizations of national hopes and aspirations, that the 
people of no one nation could receive the gods of another; 
and so they finally ceased to be respected, even by their own 
followers. 



104 Beliefs about the Bible. 

The systems of philosophy and all the ideas of the world 
were also brought together and compared one with another, 
so that they might be comprehended, that they might be 
tested, to see which were capable of standing. 

Among the great movements going on in the intellectual 
development of the Jews was the attempt to reconcile the 
doctrines of Judaism with the great philosophies of Greece. 
Philo, who lived in Alexandria, a Jewish scholar of the 
century preceding the birth of Christ, is the most distin- 
guished name of this epoch of Jewish life. He spent his 
life in endeavoring to reconcile the philosophy of Plato with 
the Old Testament ideas, attempting to find traces in these 
higher pagan philosophies of some primitive revelation that 
should bring their thought into connection with that of his 
old-time fathers. Out of this fusion of ideas sprang many 
of those conceptions which became living forces in the 
New Testament thought and in the development of the 
young Christianity. Not only was there a fusion of Jewish 
and Grecian ideas, but also of Oriental and Gnostic specula- 
tions. These philosophies were compared, and possible 
relations sought out ; and thus there was formed in the popu- 
lar mind a preparation for a new development, something to 
come that had not yet been understood or known. 

I wish now to point out one or two other lines of growth 
which were going on in the Jewish mind and life. 

As we open the New Testament, we find everywhere men- 
tion of the synagogues. Jesus, whenever he visits any little 
town, goes into the synagogue ; and, when the roll of Old 
Scripture is unfolded and read, he rises and speaks to the 
people. There is no trace of a synagogue in the Old Testa- 
ment. This, then, is an entirely new development in re- 
ligion. Between the time when the Old Testament closed 
and the New began, the synagogue had arisen. It occupied 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 105 

a large part of the national life, — larger than even the tem- 
ple worship. Every little village had its synagogue; and ? 
in Jerusalem, they could be counted by the hundred. There 
were as many synagogues as there are churches in the most 
populous of our Christian countries to-day. What were 
they ? Simply little meeting-houses ; places where the peo- 
ple came together on the Sabbath day, and listened to the 
reading of the Old Testament scriptures. And then, after 
the reading, just as in a modern Quaker meeting, any one 
was at liberty to stand up and comment on the passage that 
had been read, and give utterance to whatever religious 
opinions or thoughts he might have in his mind. This devel- 
opment bears in a most important way upon the growth of 
the Christian Church. The synagogue is the direct parent 
and predecessor of the Christian Church. It is undoubtedly- 
true that, if there had never been a synagogue, there never 
would have been a church ; if there never had been a scribe, 
there never would have been a minister • for the scribe was 
attached to the synagogue, and was the man who copied or 
made the rolls of the Law, the man whose business it was 
to understand the Law and interpret it to the people. The 
Law, as you know, is in the old Hebrew ; and at this time the 
Hebrew language had ceased to be spoken or written by the 
people. The common language was the Aramaic. It was 
spoken by Jesus and his apostles. It was neither Hebrew 
nor Greek, but a new dialect. The Scripture passages were 
read and translated, and comments made upon them by the 
scribe ; and you therefore see how naturally his work pre- 
cedes that which the Christian minister has done for the last 
eighteen hundred years. 

Along with this development of the synagogue, this sort 
of communal religious life of the people, there was a devel- 
opment of sects and parties among the Jews that we need 



Io6 Beliefs about the Bible. 

to understand. There are, in the later time, references to 
the Sadducees, the Pharisees, scribes, lawyers, Hellenists, or 
Grecians, the Herodians, and the Essenes. In the Old 
Testament, you find no traces of any of them. They had 
all grown up during this time between the Old Testament 
and the New. 

What were these parties ? We are accustomed to speak of 
the Sadducees as sceptics. I think this is the popular idea 
of them, — that they were the New Testament sceptics. 

We are accustomed to say that they did not believe in any 
thing, — that they did not believe in angels, in a resurrection, 
nor in any future life. Yet we shall make a capital mistake, 
if we think of them as sceptics at all. The Sadducees were 
simply the old, respectable, titled, wealthy conservatives 
among the Jews. They were typical conservatives. They 
did not believe in angels, or the resurrection, or spirits, or 
the future life. Why ? Because the Old Scriptures, which 
they stood by, and were ready to fight for through thick and 
thin, did not teach any of these ideas. They stood by the 
Law, by Moses, by all that which was oldest and most 
respectable in national life. They rejected all these new- 
fangled ideas, as they regarded them. 

Who were the Pharisees ? I used to think of them as the 
conservatives, but they were the precise opposites. They 
were the popular party that was ready to accept new ideas. 
They represented best the national life of the time. They 
were the ones who not only believed in Moses, but in the 
traditions ; and the traditions gave them an opportunity to 
incorporate into their belief, and to accept as a part of their 
religious convictions, a thousand things that the Old Script- 
ures never had said. They were the popular party among 
the people. 

I have told you who the scribes were. The lawyers were 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 107 

substantially the same as the scribes, — not lawyers like ours 
of to-day, but interpreters of the Old Testament law. 

The Hellenists formed a party which would naturally 
spring up as they came into contact with Grecian ideas and 
learning. They believed that they ought to break down 
their Jewish exclusiveness, that they ought to study Hel- 
lenistic literature. They were of course very unpopular 
with those who believed in keeping exclusively the old ideas 
and old-time national life. 

Then there was the great party of the Essenes, only re- 
ferred to incidentally in the New Testament. They lived a 
life of seclusion. They were something like the modern 
Shakers, very simple and pure in manners, hospitable and 
gentle. They have been suspected of being connected in 
some way with Oriental ideas, perhaps with Buddhism ; and 
it is a serious question whether they have not had more to 
do with the Christian Church than they have had credit for. 
It is at least a curious fact that, as soon as churches sprang 
up all through the Roman Empire, the little sect of the 
Essenes disappeared, and were never seen again. 

Passing from a consideration of these sects among the 
Jews, let me give you a little more definite idea as to where 
a great many of the popular ideas in the New Testament 
came from, and how they came into being during this period 
of which we have so little record in our hands. I refer to 
the theories of the kingdom of heaven, of angels, of the 
resurrection, of the coming of the Son of Man in the clouds 
of heaven, of the judgment, of heaven and hell, and all 
these things which are so common now in Christian thought. 
There is no trace of them, as I have told you, in the Old 
Testament. Where did they come from ? They were not, 
the larger part of them, native developments of Jewish 
thought alone. Nearly all of them were borrowed from the 



108 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Persian. They were the results of the life which the Jews 
led during their captivity. Among the Persians, and the 
Oriental nations from whom the Persians themselves derived 
many of their ideas, these conceptions were full-grown per- 
haps before the time of Moses himself. 

Very soon after the coming home of the Jews from Babylon 
there crept into their thought this belief of a great hierarchy 
of angels good and bad in perpetual conflict. From this 
comes the idea of the New Testament devil in perpetual 
conflict with God. We find, growing up in the apocalyptic 
books, especially in Enoch, which is full of these ideas, the 
full development of a belief in a judgment to come, of 
Messiah coming in the clouds of heaven, in a separation of 
the good and the bad after that judgment, of an eternity 
of blessedness and an eternity of punishment, expressed in 
almost the same ^language which we find afterward on the 
lips of Jesus himself. Almost all these ideas were appar- 
ently developed from seeds which were planted in Jewish 
thought during the time the Jews came in contact with the 
great Persian power. 

I want to lay the emphasis of this part of my theme on the 
question of the Messiah and the part it played in Jewish 
thought and life. If there had been no dream of a Messiah, 
there would have been no Christianity. It is very impor- 
tant, then, to inquire where this idea came from, and how 
much it had to do with the development of their later thought 
and life. 

If we confine ourselves to the Old Testament, we find no 
clear doctrine of a Messiah at all. We do find this, how- 
ever, which was a preparation of the soil for the reception 
of the seed, which developed into the thought of the Mes- 
siah. The Jews believed — and it was necessary, holding 
the idea of God and his government that they did — that 



The Bridge between the Testaments. 109 

they were to be prospered, that a kingdom was to be estab- 
lished which should be permanently blessed, whenever the 
time should come that the people were faithful to the law of 
their God. They did not believe in any future life : they 
believed in prosperity in this life as a reward of goodness. 
Here is the germ which developed into the doctrine of the 
Messiah ; but there is no trace of their believing in the 
coming of any personal king, only that the kingdom after 
the idea of David's rule should be restored. But this idea 
of a pre-existent Angel-Messiah, who should come as the 
angel of God to rule the world, was a common Persian 
thought ; and I believe that this idea among the Jews can 
be traced to their connection with this Oriental religion. 
Here, then, we find the next great step in the doctrine of the 
Messianic idea. 

The next step is simply to identify this supposed super- 
natural being with some one actually come. You will see 
then why it was that, when Jesus was born, the people were 
expecting the coming of the Messiah. They were being true, 
as never before, to the law of Jehovah. They believed, ac- 
cording to the fundamental idea of their religion, that this 
must bring them prosperity. They had accepted the idea 
that a kingdom was to come, and that some one sent of God, 
either a divine or an ideal man, was to rule over the chosen 
people j that he was to come and sit in judgment on all the 
earth ; that the dead were to be raised, and that the end of 
the world was to come ; and that he was to usher in a new and 
grand heavenly kingdom that should be without end. They 
were looking then on every hand for the Messiah. It was Lo 
here ! and Lo there ! And the first thing asked of Jesus, 
when he preached that the kingdom of heaven was at hand, 
was, Art thou the Messiah, the one we have expected \ or 
shall we look for another ? So, if Jesus was to play any part 



I io Beliefs about the Bible. 

in bringing in the kingdom of heaven, he must be considered 
as this expected Messiah. The role of Messiah was thrust 
upon him. He was to be the agent of God to bring in the 
kingdom of heaven. The people would accept no other. 

I believe, then, that the time had come, in the history of 
the world, when a new religion had to be born. The people 
had lost faith in the old ones. They had lost faith in their 
old philosophy, in all their old conceptions of God and man. 
There was an earnest expectation on the part of the people 
all over the world of some new development of another type, 
and a higher type, of life. So I believe that, if Jesus had 
never been born, we should have had Christianity still, or 
something substantially like it. For the ideas and anticipa- 
tions of Christianity were in the popular heart and mind, 
filling all the air. It only needed that they should centre in 
or crystallize about some person who should be accepted as 
the Messiah ; and, had this person not been Jesus, some other 
person must be found. I think this is clear, when we study 
the writings of Paul. Paul is the actual father of historic 
Christianity; but Paul never saw Jesus, except in a vision. 
He says very little about what Jesus said or did. His writ- 
ings are full of the ideal Messiah, but he takes almost no 
note of Jesus of Nazareth. It is this new revelation from 
God, this new head of a new Christianity, with which Paul 
deals. Thus, we find all these influences, which had been at 
work during the time of which we have no record in our 
Scriptures, culminating at last, naturally and necessarily, in 
the birth of a new religion, and that new religion the one that 
we call Christian, 



THE EPISTLES. 



As we come from the Old Testament to the New, we notice 
that there are four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles 
that lead the list of those books that have come to be 
regarded as canonical. It is worthy your note, in passing, 
that the Acts of the Apostles does not treat in any general 
way of the doings of the twelve apostles, but only concerns 
itself with certain passages in the life chiefly of Peter and 
Paul. The significance of that I shall refer to later. 

As I wish to treat of the New Testament, in a general 
way in the order of time, rather than the order in which the 
publishers have happened to place the books, I pass by the 
Gospels and the Acts and come to the Epistles ; for you are 
probably aware of the fact that nearly all the Epistles, the 
principal ones most certainly, were written some time before 
any of the Gospels were brought into their present condition. 

When the First Epistle was written, which was probably 
the first Epistle of Paul to the Church in Thessalonica, 
Jesus had been dead but about twenty years. That is, the 
people were then about as far away from his time as we are 
from the time of Abraham Lincoln, and, of course, there 
would be a great many persons alive who had either seen 
Jesus, or who had seen somebody that had seen him, — 
enough to keep alive and fresh the traditions of the princi- 
pal events in his life, the principal phases of his doctrine, 



112 Beliefs about the Bible. 

and the generally believed account of his death. We must 
bear in mind, however, all the way through, that these early 
•churches did not believe that Jesus was really dead, but 
only that he had been withdrawn into the heavens for a 
little time, whence he was to return again in the clouds, 
accompanied by an innumerable retinue of angels, to raise 
the dead, to judge the world, and to usher in the new king- 
dom of God which he was to establish here upon earth. I 
refer to this only to show you the general intellectual and 
religious atmosphere of the time when these Epistles were 
written. 

There is another point to be noted. You will find that 
these letters are written to the Church in Philippi, to the 
Church in Ephesus, to the Church in Galatia, to the Church 
in Rome, etc. That is, and this is the point, the first 
churches, as we should naturally expect, were organized in 
the great cities scattered over the Roman Empire, the princi- 
pal centres of intellectual life and thought. I refer to this, 
so as to bring you into sympathy with the natural growth 
of these churches, that you may see how, under ordinary 
human laws, they happened to be what they were. 

In process of time, those who rejected the claims of Chris- 
tianity came to be called pagans and heathen. Did you ever 
think why ? The word " pagan " is from a Latin word paga- 
nus, which means a villager. The word " heathen " is simply 
heath-men, men who lived out on the heath, peasants. This 
suggestion is mainly interesting, as I think, because it lets us 
into the secret, which is true to-day just as it was then, that 
any new movement always finds its first footing in the town, 
where thought is most active, where opinions are most fluent, 
where it is easier to get a hearing for a new idea, and where 
a new thought first finds lodgement in the minds and activi- 
ties of men. However sturdy and noble and grand the coun- 



The Epistles. 1 1 3 

try may be in the make-up of its moral fibre, yet it is always 
a little behind the town. Just as last year's fashions are this 
year's fashions in the country, so the intellectual and relig- 
ious fashions follow this same law : they start in the centre 
of intellectual activity, and then spread slowly toward the 
country. 

These churches, then, these new organizations, were dotted 
here and there over the Roman Empire in the great centres 
of commercial and intellectual activity. They were not, as 
yet, — between 50 and 60 A.D., when the first Epistles were 
written, — very numerous, very large, or very powerful. 

These little churches were simply made up of the few men 
who had accepted the claims of the new Messiah, and who, 
while they were waiting for his immediate return, — for both 
Jesus and Paul taught explicitly that he was to come back 
before that generation had entirely passed away, — would 
naturally place little emphasis on the affairs of this world. 
It is not strange, therefore, that they established practical 
communism, selling their houses and lands, just as in modern 
times Millerites have done, believing that the world was com- 
ing to an end in three, five, or ten years. What was the use 
of laying out schemes of business, plans for the regeneration 
of this world, social or political improvements ? What was the 
use of being troubled, if Caesar was a tyrant and was ruling the 
world ? What was the use of mourning about these things ? 
So Paul tells them not to be troubled, for the time is short, 
and the end is at hand. Therefore, they sold their property, 
and tried to make one another as comfortable as possible, 
establishing these little brotherhoods in the great centres 
of activity, and then, laboring and doing their daily duty as 
best they could, awaited the coming of the kingdom of God 
with its heavenly magnificence and glory. In the face of a 
belief like that, of course it would not occur to any one to 



114 Beliefs about the Bible, 

write any Gospels. What did they want of Gospels ? The 
people who were living already knew about Jesus, and some 
of them were to live until he came again. So they did not 
take the trouble to make any record of his life and teachings 
at that time. 

But you will see how naturally the Epistles arose. Here 
were these churches, perplexed on every hand by practical 
questions. They had just come out of heathenism. In those 
days, if you were to dine with a heathen, the chances were 
that he would go through some religious ceremony preceding 
the feast, to consecrate the animal that he was to have for 
his dinner. It was a very vital question, then, whether the 
new Christians were to be permitted to attend such feasts, and 
eat the meat that had been offered to idols ; whether in so 
doing they became accomplices in idolatry. You remember 
how often Paul refers to this. They questioned, also, 
whether it was necessary to keep the Mosaic law, and they 
looked to their leaders for answers. Those who had seen 
Jesus, or who had received traditions of him from others' 
lips, could have him for guidance in this matter ; but others 
did not know just what they were required to believe, and 
all sorts of practical questions would naturally spring up 
while they were waiting for his second coming. It was to 
answer these difficulties and to solve these practical problems 
that the Epistles came to be written. 

We must remember another thing. It is absurd for any- 
body to suppose that Paul or Peter or James, or any of the 
writers of the Epistles, ever had the slightest idea that these 
letters would become a part of a book, to be referred to as 
a standard of belief and doctrine eighteen hundred years 
after that time. And this absurdity appears in what I have 
already stated, that they expected the world to come to 
an end before the people who wrote the letters were dead. 



The Epistles. 115 

They expected Jesus to come again to earth, and reign again 
as their king, for at least a thousand years. This idea is 
still thrilling and throbbing through parts of the New Testa- 
ment, especially the Apocalypse, or the Book of Revelation. 
It is all on tiptoe with this upward and onward looking 
for the coming of the Lord. When Jesus should come, 
there would be no reason, and almost no need, of any 
book to announce his will; for he himself would be the 
living king, dispensing his own law and executing his own 
judgments. 

These letters, then, were simply temporary and local expe- 
dients to meet the exigencies of that time. If you read 
them carefully in the light of that idea, you will find nearly 
all your perplexities solved. It is not my purpose to go into 
minute criticism of one Epistle after another. Instead of 
any textual criticism, I wish to give some general ideas for 
which they stand ; but it is worth my while to point otu 
first one or two significant facts concerning a few of them. 

Take the little Epistle of Jude. Jude says that he was the 
brother of James. He was not himself an apostle, but, per- 
haps, the brother of an apostle. There is one thing in that 
little letter which of itself is sufficient to forever render 
absurd any claim for the entire infallibility of the Bible. I 
have spoken to a great many orthodox ministers concerning 
it, who had never had their attention called to it. I spoke 
to you last Sunday concerning the Book of Enoch, — a wild, 
crude, unreliable, apocalyptic book, written within a hundred 
years of the time of Christ. Jude quotes it as being the 
work of the old patriarch, "the seventh from Adam." Here 
is a palpable blunder. 

The Epistle of James was written apparently to offset 
Paul's doctrine of "justification by faith." James evidently 
thought Paul was pushing that too far. He said it was well 



Il6 Beliefs about the Bible. 

enough to have faith, but you must supplement faith and 
manifest the reality of that faith by works, or it becomes 
dead and fruitless. This was the first general contribution 
to the seething discussion of the age. 

There is no occasion for me to say anything concerning 
the three Epistles of John, except that there is little reason 
to suppose John the Apostle wrote them. Neither need I 
detain you with a special reference to the writings known as 
the Epistles of Peter. The second certainly was not written 
by him, and it is doubtful about the first ; but it makes little 
difference to us. 

Concerning the Epistle to the Hebrews, ordinarily called 
the work of Paul, there is hardly a scholar in the world who 
thinks that Paul wrote it. It devotes itself to an endeavor 
to justify Christianity to those who had come out from the 
Jewish Church. It shows how the old dispensation was 
preparatory to Christianity; that every thing prefigured it; 
that it represented the symbol and shadow of which Chris- 
tianity is the substance and reality. This, you will see, must 
have met a very pressing need or want at that time, when 
one of the most important and practical questions of the 
Jew was whether, when he became a Christian, he was false 
to the old and divine dispensation which had been given to 
his fathers. 

I wish now to confine myself entirely to the attitude and 
work of Paul. Paul is the great name in historic Christian- 
ity, second only in rank and dignity to that of Jesus, and 
not even second to him in the power which he has exerted 
over thought. Instead, however, of going into a general 
examination of the Epistles, I want, in some general, graphic 
way, to give you Paul's attitude toward the universe, to set 
forth the scheme which he held, and which he made a vital 
power in the development of civilization. There is no man 



The Epistles. 117 

in all the past ages more alive to-day than Paul, or who is 
having more to do with men that have never thought very 
much about it, and who have least appreciated the signifi- 
cance of the work which he wrought. 

It is not necessary for my purpose that I should discuss 
all the questions that have been mooted by the critics as to 
whether he wrote all the Epistles that have passed under his 
name. It does not make any speqial difference to our 
consideration, for the doctrines we care to note are taught 
in the Epistles which are undoubtedly his. 

In the first place, then, in order to understand this Pauline 
doctrine, you must remember that he was a grand, sturdy, 
unfaltering believer in predestination of the most cast-iron 
sort. No man who ever lived has taught it more explicitly 
and clearly than he. God is the absolute sovereign, and he 
has a right through all the eternities to do whatever he will ; 
and puny, short-sighted man has no right to question it. 
This is the attitude of Paul. God has a perfect right, to 
use his figure, to take one lump of clay, and make a vase to 
hold flowers in the parlor: he has a right to take another 
lump, and make a coarse, crude pot for use in the kitchen ; 
and neither lump has a right to say anything about it one 
way or the other. He has a right to make one man for one 
use, and another for another, — to predestinate one to suc- 
cess and glory, to predestinate another to failure and dis- 
aster ; and these have no right to question either the wisdom 
or justice of the dispensation. But, in justice to Paul, I wish 
you to note that the outcome of his doctrine is quite differ- 
ent from that of Calvin and modern Orthodoxy. 

The next great doctrine of Paul is his uncompromising, 
unhesitating acceptance of the legend that teaches the fall of 
man. Adam, the first man, stood as the earthly head of 
humanity up to his time. The doctrine of the " federal head- 



n8 Beliefs about the Bible, 

ship," as it has come to be called in theology, is undoubtedly 
a Pauline doctrine. Man, with Adam at the head up to the 
time of the birth of Christ, had been simply a disastrous 
failure. In Adam, all died ; through Adam came sin ; through 
Adam came sorrow; through Adam came all the disasters 
that have ever afflicted poor, suffering humanity. Paul, of 
course, had none of the means of knowledge at the disposal 
of any intelligent man in the modern world. He did not 
know, therefore, that death had reigned not only since Adam 
and over all his descendants, but for some thousands and 
millions of years before Adam was ever thought of. He did 
not know that suffering and pain had been in existence, not 
only among men, but in the animal world for millions of 
years. If he had, he would have had no more faith in the 
doctrine of the fall than I have. But Paul believed in the 
federal headship of Adam ; that he was the representative 
and leader of the world up to that time, and that, under his 
headship, the world had been a failure. Naturally, then, he 
turned to some scheme of recovery. He desired to find 
some way in which this long failure could be turned into 
success. He desired to find some method, a part of the 
secret council and fore-knowledge of God, — for not only the 
fall, but the redemption was part of the predestination of 
Paul, — by which a new order of things could be instituted, 
and the world be ultimately crowned with success. 

Here, then, we are led to consider Paul's view of Christ. 
There is another thing also, at the outset, to which I wish to 
call your careful attention ; for people seem to read the Bible 
in a blindfold and sleepy way, if they read it at all, — never 
thinking of comparing part with part, or treating it as they 
would treat any other book, or as they should, if they wish to 
learn anything from it. I was taught in this way myself. 
I was taught to read so many verses as so much religious 



The Epistles. 119 

duty accomplished ; so many square inches of Bible, so much 
goodness. Thus, people read the Bible, never using their 
brains and common sense about it. 

We need now to consider Paul's attitude toward Christ, — 
toward Christ, not toward Jesus ; for it is hardly too much 
to say that Paul made no account of the personal Jesus 
whatever. I want to make that distinction clear. Paul does 
not have anything to say about Jesus. The only time he 
quotes his words is when he gives the story of the Last 
Supper, and, in another place, where he quotes a saying 
from Jesus that does not appear in the Gospels. He does 
not anywhere say anything about what Jesus did. He has 
not a hint anywhere of any miraculous conception. He 
speaks of no miracles in the modern sense of that 
word. He only refers in a general way to signs and won- 
ders. But he believed that "speaking with tongues," that 
incoherent gibberish and babbling, was a miracle; so you can 
understand what he meant when he spoke of signs and won- 
ders. He says nothing about his raising people from the dead 
or feeding the multitude. Yet you must remember that he 
stood nearest to Jesus of all who wrote of him in the New 
Testament. It is strange that he should not allude to these 
things in all of his Epistles. There is not a trace of his 
having any personal love for Jesus, the man. He says, 
frankly and distinctly, that he never saw him, except in a 
vision ; and he makes so little account of these things that, 
when he comes up to Jerusalem and talks over the condition 
of the early Church with the apostles, he says they had 
nothing to tell him that he cared anything about, — to use his 
own phrase, they " added nothing" to him. He refers to the 
apostles very slightingly, "those who seemed to be some- 
what," to be pillars. He speaks of them with hardly dis- 
guised antagonism and irony; and he was in antagonism with 



120 Beliefs about the Bible. 

them the most of his life. You see how little account he 
makes of the historic Jesus. What does he make account 
of ? Of the theologic Christ as standing for a part of the 
scheme of the divine economy in the salvation of the 
world. 

There are three distinct stages of progress very perceptible 
in Paul's writings, as illustrating three stages of growth in 
his mind concerning the doctrine of Christ. In the first 
place, he is converted to the belief that Jesus is the Messiah. 
But he does not stop there. We find at the last that he had 
risen to the belief that Jesus was a pre-existent being ; that 
he was the Angel-Messiah ; that he was the first-born of 
every creature; that he was the beginning of the creation of 
God, and only less than God himself. But the great thing 
that he believed, whether he called him Messiah or pre- 
existent angel or head of the Church, was that Jesus was 
the head of a new and renovated humanity. 

I have told you what Paul believed about Adam, that he 
was the head of the race that was a. failure. Over against 
Adam, the old man, he sets Christ, the new man, revealed 
from heaven as the new head of the new humanity. This 
is the most significant thing in the whole belief of Paul, so 
far as his doctrine of Christ is concerned. He was the head 
of the new order of humanity. Those who became engrafted 
into the Church, those who became followers and disciples 
of Christ, put off the old idea of Adam, sloughed off their 
whole association with the old and false order of humanity, 
and became members of this new race,— the redeemed and 
renovated Church of God. This is the doctrine of Paul 
concerning Christ. 

I said, a little while ago, that the predestination taught by 
Paul had a far different outcome for the history of this world 
from that taught by Calvin and the orthodox churches of the 



The Epistles. 12 1 

day. He teaches that the fall of man and the redemption 
are parts of the one divine plan of him who, as a sovereign, 
works his eternal will. But he held so grand a conception 
of God that he believed it is a part of this sovereign will 
that the world ultimately, this whole groaning, travailing, 
weeping, and crying creation, shall be redeemed. So he 
teaches that the Jews were rejected and outcast only as a. 
temporary thing, only as the occasion of the bringing in of 
the Gentiles. He teaches that, when by and by the Gentiles 
are all brought in, then the Jews also are to be reclaimed ; 
and then, under Christ, there is no longer to be any Jew or 
Greek, any civilized or barbarian. They are all to be one 
as parts of this new humanity. Christ is to be the head of 
it, and all the world is to be brought into one under his head- 
ship. Then, at the last, Christ is to deliver up the kingdom 
to the Father, and God is to be all and in all. 

Ultimately, then, Paul was both a Universalist and a Uni- 
tarian ; for, although he teaches the pre-existence of this 
Christ, he teaches plainly his subordination to God, -and, as 
the final outcome of everything, that he is to give up the 
kingdom to the one God, and all men are to be part of this 
kingdom. This is the outcome of Paul's doctrine of predes- 
tination. 

I have left to the last that which is the grandest work that 
Paul wrought, — a work as grand as that which almost any 
man has ever wrought in the history of humanity. 

I said in the beginning that there were two factions in 
the early churches. It was inevitable that there should be. 
Here were these Jews who had been taught and trained for 
ages into the belief that the Mosaic dispensation was not 
only divine, but eternal ; that, on the basis of this, a new 
kingdom, after the type of the kingdom of David, was to be 
established, and the Jews were to rule over the world for- 



122 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ever. But here comes in a new claimant, a new Messiah, as 
those who accepted the Messianic doctrine believed. And 
here comes Paul, organizing churches all over the Roman 
Empire, and saying that this divine dispensation of Judaism 
is obsolete and outgrown. It is very natural that it should 
require some time to accept so strange a doctrine as that. 
James said, the old first church at Jerusalem said, all the 
apostles said, You must also keep the law of Moses, or you 
cannot be saved. They sent their emissaries after Paul all 
over the Roman Empire, because they regarded him as the 
most dangerous heretic of the age. They felt that he was 
trying to do good, but that he was teaching false doctrine in 
saying that it was not necessary to keep the law of Moses. 
After a while, they found that they had to compromise, and 
they said, You do not have to keep all, but there are certain 
things you must keep ; and, for a long time, they still clung 
to the idea of the shadow after they had given up the sub- 
stance. It was ages before they gave up the notion that a 
Jewish Christian was not better than a Gentile one. They 
believed that there was an advantage in having been born in 
the Jewish religion. This was the origin of the great divi- 
sion in the Church, with Peter at the head on the one hand, 
and Paul at the head on the other. For a great many years, 
this discussion rent the Church in twain and almost threat- 
ened its existence. You find traces of it throughout the 
New Testament, one party hitting at the other, and that in 
turn striking back; Paul striking hard blows on one side, 
and his opponents returning them on the other. 

The Acts of the Apostles is a very late book. It was 
written after this warfare between the two churches had 
practically died out. It was a sort of compromise, written 
by somebody who wanted to unite these two factions. You 
will notice a strange parallelism between the sayings and 



The Epistles. 123 

doings of Paul and Peter in this book. If, in one chapter, 
Paul is represented as doing something wonderful, you will 
find Peter doing as strange a thing in the next. This book is 
evidently written for the express purpose of healing over this 
division in the Church and doing justice to both sides. 

But, now, what is the point of the grand work that Paul 
did ? If it had not been for Paul, we might not have had an 
historic Christianity. We should certainly have had a very 
different one, and not so good a one as that which we have 
had. It would have been impossible for the early apostles 
to have forced upon the Roman Empire not only a belief in 
Jesus, but also the practice of all the ritual of the Jews. 
If they had attempted that, the whole effort would have 
broken down, and Christianity would have been merely a 
new sect of Judaism confined to a few followers. But Paul, 
with his views, felt that the hour of the Mosaic ritual had 
struck. The past had been a failure, or at most only a 
type, a shadow leading on to Christ, the head of the new 
humanity. And so he said : The works of the law, that 
neither you nor your fathers could keep, are dead rubbish, 
to be swept away. So he dispensed with sacrifices and 
the Jewish Sabbath, and it may be noted he did not say 
anything about any other. You need not pay any atten- 
tion to the laws of Moses, he said. They are all gone by. 
They are only a shadow leading to Christ; and, now that 
Christ has come, everything is summed up in faith in him. 
And so arose Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. He 
became the liberator of the world, and we are to rank him as 
hardly second among the great men who have snapped the 
shackles that have bound the freedom of the human race. 
Paul broke off this enclosing shell of Moses, and set civiliza- 
tion free. This doctrine of justification by faith was the 
weapon with which he did it ; for he said : Whether you are 



124 Beliefs about the Bible, 

Jew or Gentile, it does not make any difference. Only appro- 
priate and incorporate into your own life the life of this new 
Christ. Do it by faith. If you believe and accept, you are a 
part of this new dispensation of God. And so Jew and 
Gentile, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, no matter who, any man 
who accepted Christ, became a part of this new kingdom of 
heaven \ and thus all the petty, worrying, wearing, exacting, 
ritualistic ceremonies of the Jews were abolished at one 
stroke. Paul's belief in salvation by faith was not a mere 
petty intellectual assent to an idea. It was with him a be- 
lieving in something all over, in such dead earnest that you 
are ready to give your life for it ; just as you business men 
believe in a thing so that you are ready to risk a fortune on 
it. Faith is not merely saying, yes, when somebody an- 
nounces a proposition. It is a belief that drags a whole 
train of character and consequences after it. That is Paul's 
belief in justification by faith. 

How broad that was, and what power of freedom it had in 
it, was proved again in the sixteenth century. The Christian 
Church, under the Catholic power, had become nothing more 
nor less than a worse Judaism, with ritual and ceremo- 
nial, — everything except character, manliness, and force, — 
when Luther rose; and the weapon with which he broke 
the chains of modern Europe was Paul's old grand doctrine. 
I am not sure that we are done with that weapon yet. It 
does not belong by any patent right to Orthodoxy. Paul 
forged the weapon. Paul tried its temper and proved its 
power. Then, it lay rusting and waiting for a thousand 
years, until Luther proved strong enough to wield it, and 
once more to fight again the battle for human freedom. 
And, though it be put away in its armory, it will be called 
for again and again. For this doctrine means simply going 
right deep down to the heart of humanity, and saying that 



The Epistles. 125 

what you believe with your whole heart, and are willing to 
put your life into, is that which makes you what you are. 

This, then, is the service which Paul rendered to the world \ 
and it is hints of this service which are scattered all through 
these Epistles, and which will make them in all coming 
time, whatever theory of the Bible may go up or down, of 
inestimable value to those who care to know the history of 
humanity. 



THE GOSPELS. 



As we open the New Testament, we find the four Gospels, 
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, leading the list of its 
books. Yet, as I had occasion to tell you in my sermon on 
the Epistles, if we follow, as I have tried to do in a rough 
fashion, the chronological order, we shall place the Gospels 
at the end of the New Testament rather than at the begin- 
ning. It was perfectly natural and indeed inevitable, as I 
have already showed you, that the Gospels should have been 
written after the Epistles were. It could hardly have been 
otherwise in the state of Christian belief that existed then ; 
for it was a part of that early belief taught, as they sup- 
posed, not only by apostle and teacher, but by the Master 
himself, that Jesus was very soon to return from sitting at 
the right hand of God in the heavens, that he was to raise 
the dead, that there was to be a general judgment and a 
miraculous ushering in of the world-wide Messianic kingdom. 
Of course, then, expecting him, perhaps to-night, possibly to- 
morrow, next week, — at the utmost, very soon, — they would 
feel no necessity of writing down long stories of his life or 
connected statements of what he had said. It was only 
after they had waited and were disappointed ; after they had 
expected, and he had not come ; after they had begun to 
look over the promises of his coming, and see if, in any way, 
they could explain the delay, — it was only after all this that 
there arose on the part of those little scattered Christian 



The Gospels. 127 

communities in the Roman Empire a feeling of the necessity 
for some connected and authoritative record of what the 
waited-for Jesus had said and done. Then, of course, it was 
very natural that those who had opportunity to know these 
things should write more or less full and connected accounts 
of them, and that thus the Gospels should spring up. 

These four Gospels, four little thin pamphlets, — for they 
could all be comprehended within the limits of less than a 
hundred pages, — are really the most significant part perhaps 
of all the world's literature. They tell, or claim to tell, the 
story of the life of that Galilean peasant who, after spend- 
ing his youth in utter obscurity, flashes into the sight 
of his countrymen for a year, or two, or three, according 
as we take one account or another, then disappears by 
an ignominious death, and, after two or three hundred years, 
is exalted, in the reverence of the civilized world, to the 
position of Almighty God. No rational man, then, can be 
indifferent to the nature and authority of these little books, 
when they tell us a story which has played a part in the 
history of the civilized world so stupendous, so unique, that 
it stands alone, and has no second. 

What, then, is it that we desire to know concerning them ? 
We want to know of course, first, by what authority these 
little pamphlets speak. Are they the word of God, infal- 
libly, eternally true? Or are they the traditions of men, 
stories naturally springing up and growing through the 
imaginative and creative consciousness of the early Church ? 
Who wrote them ? Did Matthew and Mark and Luke and 
John write them, just as we have them to-day ? If they did, 
who were Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and how much 
are their opinions worth ? 

Whichever way we look at these Gospels, you see we 
come back to the question of the authority of these books, 






128 Beliefs about the Bible. 

the power by which they speak. It is in pursuit of this that 
I ask you to come with me this morning, while I examine 
this subject. I trust you will appreciate the difficulty and 
magnitude of my task. It is nothing more nor less than 
to condense into some comprehensible shape whole libraries, 
and, if I may, pack them, so that my story shall have 
some significance and meaning, within the abbreviated limits 
of an hour. 

Let us then start from the stand-point of our modern 
world, and go up the ages, and see what we can find out 
about these books. 

The oldest manuscript that we have of them takes us 
back only to the fourth century, — that is, some three 
hundred years after the death of him concerning whom they 
were written. The first question we naturally ask is, 
whether there is reason to suppose that we have these four 
little books in substantially the same shape in which they 
were originally written. Three hundred years had passed 
since the death of him of whom they are a biography ; and 
we do not know just when they came into the precise shape 
in which they are to-day. The names now attached to 
them we do not find until nearly the last quarter of the 
second century, — that is, perhaps one hundred and fifty 
years after the death of Jesus, although the earliest forms 
of the Gospels may have existed long before that. 

The first question, then, as I have said, is whether we 
have an accurate transcript of these four little books in 
substantially the same shape in which they were when they 
first took form. We are obliged to answer this question in 
the negative; for the different manuscripts of the Gospels 
which are in existence give us some hundreds, if not 
thousands, of various renderings. There are differences in 
words or in phrases, a difference of half a sentence, some- 



The Gospels. 129 

times differences of whole paragraphs, or sometimes half a 
chapter, or even more than that. Then, we know that there 
were changes through the carelessness of transcribers. 
There were changes from dogmatic reasons, in order that 
the person copying or using them might make them teach 
what they held to be true. In this way, changes of greater 
or less magnitude were made. Sometimes, they were the 
result of intentional fraud. Let me give you the authority 
of Origen, one of the most famous and learned of all the 
church Fathers. It was some time after the New Testament 
books were written before they took on the character of 
sacred writings, when a man would not have been regarded 
as sacrilegious for taking from or adding to them. They 
were considered as the work of ordinary men, and not too 
sacred to be touched or changed as yet. But, whatever may 
have been thought of the books of the New Testament in 
the early Church, the entire Church at the time professed to 
regard with almost superstitious sacredness the books of 
the Old Testament. That was the Scripture before the New 
Testament became Scripture. Yet we have the authority of 
Origen, writing in the fourth century, for the statement that, 
in the heated and angry controversies of that period, people 
did not scruple to change even the text of the Old Testa- 
ment for their own purposes. Concerning the Septuagint, 
he says: "There are evidently great discrepancies in the 
copies of the Septuagint, whether attributable to the careless- 
ness of scribes, or to the rash and pernicious alteration 
of the text by some, and the unauthorized interpolations 
and omissions of others." Origen writes in that way about 
the manner in which the early Church dared to treat even 
the Old Testament Scriptures ; so you can imagine with 
what freedom they would handle the less sacred and newer 
books that afterwards came to be the New Testament. 



130 Beliefs about the Bible. 

We know, then, that there were great changes made. 
These books floated around in the churches, and passed 
through some of the most biting, bitter, and burning con- 
troversies that the religious world has ever seen. They 
hurled texts on both sides with as much vigor as has been 
done in the modern world. When you remember that there 
were only manuscripts, that there were no printed books, no 
standards of authority or appeal, you can see how easy it 
might be for a man to make a change in his own copy, and 
then claim that that was the original. Another man having 
a copy that did not agree with it would claim that his was 
the original, and the one who claimed the loudest would be 
likely to carry the day. 

Another point. Were there more than four Gospels, and, 
if so, how does it happen that we have only four to-day ? 

There were a great many Gospels written in the early 
Church. I have here in my hand, for example, a copy of 
the apocryphal New Testament. It is almost as large as 
the genuine one. This book is made up of Gospels, visions, 
and allegories, which were rejected by the orthodox of the 
Church as time went on. It contains at the beginning four 
Gospels, the Gospel of Mary, the Protevangelion, the Gospel 
of the Infancy, the Gospel of Nicodemus. I also hold in 
my hand the book of an eminent High Churchman of 
England, entitled Lost and Hostile Gospels, which gives an 
account of ten which were known to the early Church, a 
part on one side of the great controversy, and a part on 
the other. I had occasion, in a previous sermon, as you 
will remember, to refer to the great controversy in the 
early Church between Paul, who was in favor of admitting 
the Gentiles, and the other section, headed by Peter and 
James, who believed that no Gentiles should come in, or 
only by practically becoming Jews. This controversy raged 



The Gospels. 131 

for a long period of years \ and we find, as a record of it, 
certain Gospels called the Petrine Gospels, representing the 
Hebraic side, and another set called the Pauline Gospels, 
which take Paul's side of the controversy. They went to 
the extent of changing the records of the Gospels them- 
selves, coloring them to suit one faction or another of this 
great party controversy. These Gospels, many of them, 
were written or changed, as it was supposed, in the interest 
of heretical sects, though it is quite a question whether those 
that came to be called heretical were not originally the 
orthodox ones who changed to heretics by being left be- 
hind; for Orthodoxy changed, as it has been changing 
ever since, and that which represented the older ideas 
became the heresies left behind. 

Along toward the latter part of the second century, we find 
that the sifting process has gone on, and the Church has come 
to a general consensus of opinion as to which Gospels should 
be accepted as genuine ; and those were the four that we have 
in our hands to-day. 

We can reconstruct some of those lost and hostile Gospels ; 
that is, we can tell almost the whole story of the life of 
Jesus as told there, through picking up the quotations made 
here and there in the controversial writings of the day. 
Take, for example, the Gospel of Marcion, one of the leading 
heretics of the time. He had a Gospel which he claimed to 
be older than any we possess, and which I am inclined to 
think was so. This represented Jesus as human, and took 
the Hebraic side of the controversy. Marcion, being one 
of the great leaders of heresy, was quoted by all the princi- 
pal writers of the time. They quoted his Gospel here and 
there and everywhere to such an extent that we can, in the 
literature of the early Church, pick out nearly the whole of 
it, and put it together like a piece of mosaic work. As 



132 Beliefs about the Bible. 

letting you into the secret of the state of mind of one of 
those early Fathers that we are accustomed to look upon 
with such exaggerated reverence, let me give a specimen of 
his opinions. After the Gospel of John had been written 
and become popular, and the four Gospels had been decided 
on, Irenaeus, writing about 185 A.D., gives his reason why, in 
his opinion, there are these four Gospels and no more ; and 
it is a most astonishing reason. He does not say there are 
four Gospels because there were only four writers who told 
the truth, because there were only four who wrote with au- 
thority, that there were only four who were inspired to do 
this kind of work. He does not say anything about that. 
What does he say ? " It is impossible that the Gospels can be 
more or less than they are. For, as there are four zones in 
the world which we inhabit, and four principal winds, while 
the Church is spread abroad throughout the earth, and the 
pillar and basis of the Church is the gospel and the spirit 
of life, it is right that she should have four pillars, exhaling 
immortality on every side, and bestowing renewed vitality 
on men. From which fact, it follows that the Word has 
given us four versions of the gospel united by one spirit." 

I want you now to consider with me a little the traces of 
growth which have taken place in these four Gospels. If 
you look at them carefully, you will have to divide them into 
two parts ; the first part containing the first three Gospels, 
Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the second part John, by itself. 
The first three have been called the Synoptic Gospels, from 
two Greek words meaning taking a common view, or seeing 
together. They give in general the same view of Jesus, dif- 
ferent from that of John. 

Look at the first three, and you will see some of the evi- 
dences lying on the surface which prove to us that we do not 
have the record as it could have been written in the time or 



The Gospels. 133 

near the time of Jesus. Of course, I shall not be able to go 
into very minute points of criticism. I shall only give you 
specimens of what might be multiplied indefinitely. 

Take the genealogies first. Matthew has a genealogy, and 
Luke has one ; yet they both tell the story of the miraculous 
conception. They both tell us that Jesus was the son of 
Mary without any human father. Yet they take the pains to 
give us at length the genealogy of Joseph, as though that had 
anything to do with it. Unless Jesus was the son of Joseph, 
giving his genealogy does not prove that he was the son of 
David or of Abraham, any more than it proves that I am. Of 
course, it has nothing whatever to do with it. Take one or two 
other little hints akin to this. Jesus is represented when a 
mere boy as betraying remarkable precocity in the journey 
made to Jerusalem. Yet we find his mother, who ought to 

(Eave known whether he was the son of the Holy Spirit, 
utterly astonished at this evidence of precocity. We find his 
brothers charging him with being possessed with the devil, and 
having no sort of faith in him. We find his townsmen laugh- 
ing at him, ridiculing his pretensions. Could it be possible 
that they had had the slightest hint that this was the son of 
the Most High God, — not only that, but very God himself ? 
If so, ought they to have been very much astonished at any 
proof of wisdom he might display in his early childhood or 
in any part of his career ? Ought his mother to have been 
astonished that he should feel that he had a career before 
him, and that he did not ask parental guidance or permis- 
sion concerning it ? 

Another point. We find in the Gospels as we have them 
now a phrase in which Jesus is represented as giving his 
disciples the following command : " Go ye therefore and 
teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father 
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost." Turn to PauPs 



134 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Epistles. We find him talked about, charged with baptizing 
disciples into his own name. Would it have been possible 
for him or for any of the disciples to have baptized in the 
name of Paul, when they had been commanded to baptize in 
the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? We 
know perfectly well from the development of doctrine that, 
until the second or third centuries, the doctrine of the Trinity 
was not held at all. So that the fact that this phrase is lying 
there on the surface of the gospel proves beyond question 
that it belongs to a later age, and must have been placed 
there after the doctrine that it represents had grown into 
the consciousness and belief of the early Church. 

Take another point. Jesus is represented, the very last 
thing before he left the earth, as commanding his disciples 
to "go into all the world and preach the gospel to every 
creature " ; yet he has not been dead ten years before the 
Church is rent into factions wrangling over the question 
whether they shall allow any Gentile to hear preaching or 
not, whether they shall admit a Gentile, even if he wants 
to come. Is it possible that Jesus could have uttered those 
words, and all the apostles have forgotten them so quickly? 
Think what a weapon they would have been to Paul ! What 
if he could have said to Peter and James, Do you not 
remember that the very last thing the Master said before 
leaving the earth was that we were to preach the gospel to 
every creature ! But neither Paul refers to it in controversy, 
nor does James or Peter. The inference is irresistible 
that the words were placed there in a later age, after the 
Pauline faction had won the day; and, then, Jesus is 
represented as indorsing that which was an accomplished 
fact. 

In the eighteenth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is represented 
as telling how to deal with those who should become hereti- 



The Gospels. 135 

cal or offenders in the Church. There was not any church 
in existence until long after he died. It was absurd to 
suppose he was talking about church regulations before the 
Church existed. Then, the spirit of the directions is utterly 
foreign to the Master. He was always exceedingly tender 
to publicans and sinners and outcasts. But, here, Jesus is 
made to say of such an offending disciple : " If he neglect 
to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man 
and a publican." Can you conceive those words in the 
mouth of the tender, forgiving, human Son of Man ? 

Take one more point. In the twenty-fifth chapter of 
Matthew, Jesus is represented as sitting on the throne 
of judgment, and before him are gathered all the nations 
of the earth ; and he is giving, as Almighty God, the con- 
ditions of eternal salvation. What are they? Simply, 
moral goodness, — healing the sick, visiting those in prison, 
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, looking after 
the lowest outcast. These are the conditions. If there 
were any other conditions, can you conceive him who 
had come on purpose to save men as forgetting all 
about them ? What is to become then of all that shall die 
between the time he utters those words and the time that 
Almighty God shall correct his statement, and give a true 
version of the conditions of eternal life? Yet, in the last 
chapter of the Gospel of Mark, we find the same Jesus 
represented as sending his disciples into all the world to 
preach the gospel to every creature. And what are the 
conditions of salvation that are here given? "He that 
believeth and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that 
believeth not shall be damned." Not a word about good- 
ness or morality. Instead of its being the Son of Man 
who utters these last words, I am compelled to imagine in 
his place a robed and self-sufficient bishop of the Church, 



136 Beliefs about the Bible. 

domineering and dictatorial toward those who dared to 
question his words. 

These three Gospels represent three traditions in part; 
and, in part, they represent one common tradition concern- 
ing the life and teaching of Jesus. I want to hint a word 
about that which would take me a long time to develop with 
fulness and clearness, so that you may see by what process 
we get back through the maze of the improbable and the 
miraculous, until we find ourselves in the presence of the 
simple Son of Man. 

Each writer gives the story of his life. You will find it 
not only a common story, but the same words, the same 
phrases are perpetually recurring in each of these three 
different Gospels. It is settled beyond question, I think, as 
a principle of criticism that these three writers used some 
common materials; that is, Mark did not borrow from 
Matthew, nor Luke from either, but all three used a common 
fund of tradition. We find traces in the traditions of the 
times of logia, little fragmentary writings. Some one had 
gathered the sayings of Jesus, another had written a partial 
account of what he did, and so there grew up this common 
fund of tradition concerning him. And, when these Gospels 
were written, they used this common story, making such 
additions as they thought best. If we take out that which 
is common to them all, if we take out the story in which 
they all agree, and leave out that which is added, we come 
to that to which scholars have given the name of the triple 
tradition. Suppose we take three Lives of Lincoln or 
Washington, distinct in many points, and yet agreeing in 
many, we should feel more certain of those things which 
were told by all three than of what was told by any one 
alone. Precisely the same is true here. If we extract the 
story from these three Gospels, we can make out a complete 



The Gospels. 137 

history of Jesus of Nazareth, and use only the very words 
which are common to all three of these different writers. 

If we make such a story as that, what kind of a man do 
we find ? The supernatural birth is lost at once, so also the 
story of the supernatural resurrection and ascension into 
heaven. Nearly all the more stupendous and incredible 
miracles are gone ; and we stand in the presence of a simple, 
loving, tender, heroic, devoted man, — a man about whom 
wonder stories are beginning to gather, and they seem so 
simple and so natural that we can almost see the materials 
out of which they have sprung. This is the process that 
criticism is going through with to-day, just as it seeks to find 
the origin of any wonderful story that it believes to have 
had an historic basis. 

I have said John stands apart. The other three Gospels 
were growths. Neither Matthew nor Mark nor Luke wrote 
them. Those names as attached to them were purely tradi- 
tional, but without one particle of authority. We do not find 
those names until nearly two hundred years have gone by. 

It is a fact recognized by all the best orthodox criticism 
of to-day, as represented by Prof. Robertson Smith in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica, and by Dr. Abbott of the English 
Church in the same, that these Gospels are unapostolic digests 
of early traditions. That is, some one has edited and gath- 
ered into the shape in which we have them materials a good 
deal older than they. The Gospel of John, however, stands 
alone. Here, Jesus is not a simple man. It is announced 
in the very outset that it is not a simple man of whom he 
writes. John's Gospel is a theological treatise. He starts 
out with a thesis which he is going to prove, and he selects 
from the materials here and there that which shall serve his 
purpose ; and, when he is done, we recognize hardly a single 
lineament of the simple son of Joseph and Mary of the first 



138 Beliefs about the Bible. 

three Gospels, and we find in his place a grand, pre-existent, 
spiritual, metaphysical abstraction ; for the Jesus of John is 
not a man. He could by no possibility have been the same 
person about whom Matthew, Mark, and Luke are writing. 
By the time John wrote, the doctrine had developed of his 
being the pre-existent Christ, partaking of the nature of God. 
He says nothing about any human origin or birth, but begins 
with him in the heavens, before he descends to earth. Then, 
after a brief phenomenal appearance here, he disappears 
into the clouds again. 

Let us note two or three points of difference between this 
conception and the others. According to the first three 
Gospels, the public life of Jesus is given as about a year and 
a half; and he makes one journey to Jerusalem, spending 
most of his life in Galilee. 

John, on the other hand, appears to give his public life as 
continuing three years. He makes three journeys to Jerusa- 
lem, and spends the greater part of his life in Judea. Both 
cannot be true. See how different are the whole circum- 
stances, the whole atmosphere, and the kind of man. The 
writer of John evidently lived out of Judea. He lived after 
the destruction of Jerusalem. He makes all kinds of mis- 
takes in geography. He does not locate the towns correctly, 
nor under the right names. John was intensely Jewish in 
belief and sympathy, and yet the writer of this Gospel speaks 
of the Jews as though they were a foreign people. He even 
speaks to the Jews of things in their law as what is written 
" in your law/' Suppose I, a citizen of Massachusetts, should 
stand here and talk about one of the common statutes under 
which we all live as of "your law." If I came from Ohio, it 
would be appropriate enough ; but, if I lived in Massachu- 
setts, it would be absurd. Or, as if I were writing a book, 
and should speak about Americans as though I were an Eng- 



The Gospels. 139 

lishman or a Frenchman. John is speaking all the time of 
what the Jews did and said, reflecting the time when the 
Christians began to look on the Jews as natural enemies, 
and the persons who had crucified their Lord. Let me read 
a sentence here from Dr. Martineau, one of the leading 
Unitarians of the world : — 

That a constant companion of the ministry of Jesus should shift it 
almost wholly to a new theatre, should never come across a demo- 
niac, and never tell a parable; should remember nothing about the 
Kingdom of Heaven and the Coming of the Son of Man; should have 
forgotten the last Passover of the little flock, with its institution of the 
Communion, and have occupied those festival hours with the Crucifixion 
instead ; should have lost the Master's terse maxims and sweet images of 
life, thrown out in homely dialogue, and have fancied in their place 
elaborate monologues, darkened with harsh and mystic paradox, — is so 
utterly against nature as to forfeit the rank of an admissible hypothesis. 

That is, Dr. Martineau thinks it absurd that John could 
have been the author of this Gospel. Jesus does not utter 
any parables in this Gospel. He tells them not to make long 
prayers, and yet he prays through a whole chapter. He who 
was tender and loving toward the past, and who counted 
himself as a prophet like those of old, and who accepted his 
mission as prophesied and foretold, is made to say that all 
who came before him were thieves and robbers. The Jesus 
of John's Gospel is metaphysical, unlovable, hardly human, 
utterly unlike the simple man of Nazareth of the first three. 

Now, I must tell you how it came that such a Gospel as 
this should have been written, and under what bias it was 
composed. 

I have referred before to the philosophy and the sect of 
the Gnostics. They grew up in this way. When the Septua- 
gint translation of the Bible was made, there started up in 
Alexandria a great school of philosophy, the avowed pur- 
pose of which, in part, was to reconcile the religion of the 



140 Beliefs about the Bible, 

Jews and the philosophy of Greece ; and, from that day on, 
this mixture of Old Testament religion and Grecian philoso- 
phy went on, fermenting and changing according to the 
popular taste and speculations of the time, until, along in the 
second and third centuries, we find ourselves face to face 
with this great system of Gnosticism. What was the cen- 
tral point of their belief? They believed that matter was 
essentially evil and the source of evil; that God was the 
ineffable, the infinite, the unseen, who dwelt remote from all 
possible contact with the visible world. Yet, in some way, he 
was the source of all life and all things. They had, there- 
fore, to bridge over this almost infinite gulf between God 
and the world by conceiving or speculating on what they 
called ceons, or emanations. 

That is, in some inexplicable, mysterious way, a god a little 
lower than the Infinite One emanates from him, constituting 
a god of the second class, and then from this god of the 
second class emanates a third, and so on till, to make up 
the complete chain, there are about thirty different (eons or 
emanations. The last and lowest of the whole range was the 
one who created the world. They identified him with the 
Jehovah of the Old Testament. When they began to specu- 
late about the nature of Jesus, they conceived that, in some 
marvellous, mysterious way, he summed up all this chain of 
eeons, or emanations, so that it is said that in him dwelt 
all the fulness of the godhead bodily. You find in him the 
whole plerotna, the technical term by which they designated 
this whole range of ceo/is that linked the Infinite God to the 
world. It was a wild region of speculation. They did not 
have one single fact to go on, and it did not seem to occur 
to any one of them that they needed a fact. It was one wild 
chaos of speculation, in which the simplest and mildest 
virtues became endowed with personality. 



The Gospels. 141 

The opening of John's Gospel seems very simple in Eng- 
lish, — all this about life and light and truth. But, when we 
look at it carefully, we find that these were sub-gods, deities, 
spelled with a capital letter, personified ; and Jesus sums them 
all up in himself, and becomes the link to bind God and the 
world together. Under the influences of this philosophy, 
John's Gospel was written. It was a reconciling book be- 
tween the divisions in the Church, between the Gnostics 
and the other believers. When one who understands Gnosti- 
cism looks at it, he sees it all covered with the finger-marks 
of that system, as modern literature is covered over with the 
finger-marks of evolution or Darwinism. It could not have 
been written till Gnosticism was in the air, any more than 
Darwinism could exist till Darwin had lived. 

In what position do we stand concerning the life and 
words of Jesus ? Have we a record of them that is perfect, 
complete, authoritative ? 

No, we must confess that we have not, so far, as we can 
be certain, the testimony of a single eye-witness of anything 
he ever did. Paul is our oldest witness, and he never saw 
Jesus. We have not the authoritative record of a word he 
ever uttered. Yet do not misunderstand me, or think I go too 
far. I do not doubt in the least that we have substantially a 
true account of the sayings of Jesus. There are a good many 
things recorded that I believe he did not say, and of course 
he said a thousand things which are not there. But the 
words of Jesus were of such a nature that they were not 
easily to be forgotten. We may safely trust them to tradition, 
and expect them to be reported with a great deal of ac- 
curacy ; and we may believe that we have them substantially 
as he uttered them. 

As we slough off the accretions and later growths of 
miracle and marvel, what kind of a man do we see Jesus 



142 Beliefs about the Bible. 

must have been? Simply, a tender, gentle, true, God-con- 
scious man, sympathetic toward all men, a hero, a martyr, 
a man who shared the doubts and errors of his age, — which 
is only saying that he was human, — and yet rising above it 
like the Andes above a plain. He was grand in his heroism, 
simple and true when standing for his convictions in the 
face of the Roman governor and the howling mob; thought- 
ful and tender to the last, yet going unflinchingly to feel the 
nails driven through the quivering flesh that fastened him to 
the cross; a man, combining manhood's strongest strength 
and womanhood's tenderest grace; a man to be loved, to 
be honored, to be everything except worshipped. A man 
whose name we may be proud to wear, if we do not change 
it until it has a meaning that he would not have recognized. 
When we come to speak of the miracles, there is no intel- 
ligent jury in Boston could ever be induced to commit a man 
to prison for thirty days for the crime of larceny, unless they 
had stronger evidence for it than we have of any New Tes- 
tament miracle. We have stronger evidence for miracles 
performed in the time of Saint Augustine, in the time of 
Thomas a Becket, for those in Lourdes last year, than we 
have of the New Testament miracles. Yet we let them 
pass by us as the idle winds which we make no account 
of. Shall we then believe these because they are old, be- 
cause they are anonymous, because we cannot put the wit- 
nesses on the stand and cross-question them, because we do 
not know who they were or when or where they lived. But, 
even if we had proof of such things, what then ? It seems 
strange to me that people should make so much of the ques- 
tion whether John wrote the Gospel bearing his name or not. 
If he did, it is purely a literary question. If I knew that 
John, who leaned on the bosom of Jesus, wrote the Gospel, 
and therein declared that he was a supernatural being, why 



The Gospels. 143 

should I believe it ? Suppose that Mr. Herndon, after an 
intimate association of years with Lincoln, should tell me 
that it was his private conviction that Abraham Lincoln was 
a supernatural being : should I believe it ? It would be only 
his opinion, and we must have something more than a simple 
opinion of any man before we can accept the stupendous 
statement that three in heaven are different from three on 
earth, and that a fallible, weak, suffering, dying man is at 
the same moment the eternal and infinite God of all the 
. worlds. 

But, after these are all gone by, we have in this New 
Testament the record of a life whose influences cannot die, — 
one which, so far as it has had opportunity to make its own 
simple way and tell its own simple story, has been largely 
sweetening, brightening, helpful, uplifting, — and divine. 



THE RELIGION OF THE BIBLE. 



It is generally assumed that there is such a thing as " The 
Religion of the Bible." And, further, it is also generally 
assumed that this religion is one, simple, and easily discov- 
ered. Men speak of "the Word," as though indeed the 
Bible were only one word, and had but one utterance. One 
man says, " I am a Bible Christian, " as though that were a 
perfectly definite thing that any one could easily deduce from 
•a plain reading of the book. " The Bible is the religion of 
Protestants," said Chillingworth, thinking that thus he was 
plainly setting forth the grounds of the Reformation as 
against the pretensions of Rome. " Go and read your Bible 
prayerfully, and you will find it a sure and safe guide," — so 
from our childhood have we heard our ministers telling us. 

All this takes for granted that the Bible contains and 
clearly sets forth some one, definite system of religious 
truth, to the exclusion of all other systems. But what are 
the facts, as practically set forth in the real condition of the 
" Christian " world ? The Romanist prayerfully reads his 
Bible, and he finds in it the primacy of Peter, the supremacy 
of the Church, and the direction to " do penance " for the 
forgiveness of sins. The Protestant prayerfully reads it, 
and he discovers that Rome is the "mystic Babylon," the 
"mother of harlots," the " abomination of desolation." The 
Churchman reads it prayerfully, and he sees priestly suprem- 
acy and sacramental salvation. The Congregationalist reads 



The Religion of the Bible, 145 

it prayerfully, and comes away convinced that sacramental- 
ism is the deadly "works of the law " that are forbidden, 
and that every believer is his own all-sufficient priest. The 
Baptist looks into it, and sees all true believers going clean 
under the water ; while most other sects see them only going 
down to the edge of the water and standing there to be sprin- 
kled. Cromwell and his Roundheads read it, and saw every- 
where " the Lord of Hosts " leading on his followers to battle; 
and they went out shouting, " The sword of the Lord and of 
Gideon!" The Quaker reads it, and finds everywhere "the 
Prince of Peace/' hears only the command, "Resist not 
evil," and repeats after his Master, " He that takes the sword 
shall perish by the sword." The Unitarian reads it, and 
comes away flourishing the text, " My Father is greater than 
I " ; and he remembers that Jesus was sometimes ignorant, 
was weary and hungry, and seemed in all points a man. 
The Trinitarian goes into the same armory, and comes out 
wielding the phrase, " I and my Father are one." The Ortho- 
dox sees overshadowing all the pages the dreadful image of 
justice and wrath, says, " Our God is a consuming fire," and 
sees this fiery wrath flaming against his enemies even to 
the lowest hell. The Universalist sees only the loving 
"heavenly Father," and turns the most awful forebodings 
into Oriental tropes and pictorial rhetoric. The Mormon 
picks out phrases to bolster up his polygamy ; the monoga- 
mist falls back on Adam and Eve, and cries out even against 
divorce ; while the Shaker, on the basis of the personal ex- 
ample and specific words of Jesus, forbids all sexual relations 
whatever. The Northerner loaded his gun with texts, and 
went out to fight for freedom ; while the Southerner quoted 
Noah's curse against Ham, and the patriarchal example, 
and so met Bible with Bible in defence of slavery. 

What, then, is this strange book? The gypsy fortune- 



146 Beliefs abottt the Bible. 

teller sometimes invites her maiden inquirer to look into her 
magic mirror, and assures her that she shall see the face of 
her future husband. She looks and sees her own ; and, for 
explanation, she gets the intelligence that, when married, 
her face will be her husband's. Is the Bible a magic mirror, 
in which every comer sees his own face reflected ? All 
these sects — mutually exclusive, contradictory, antagonistic 
— appeal with equal confidence to the same book as the 
charter of their rights and the ground of their authority. 
Each one is sure that it is right, and equally sure that all 
the others are wrong. And, until recent times, there has 
been a short and easy way of accounting for all dissentient 
opinion. Each sect has said, " All good and honest people 
see it as I do. A different opinion means wilful blindness 
and a bad heart." And, since they have all held it the plain 
duty of "the Lord's people" to destroy his enemies, and 
since each one has held it self-evident that its enemies and 
the Lord's enemies were the same, the dominant sect has 
generally thought best to give its opponents a foretaste in 
this world of the Lord's " uncovenanted mercies " stored up 
in the nether regions of the next. 

But thoughtful people are beginning to wonder if it can 
be possible that a book that is read in so many different 
ways can teach one and only one system of truth. They are 
beginning to wonder if it can be a plain revelation that 
reveals so many different things. Of course, if one is at 
liberty to pick and choose, to wink hard when you come to 
the hard places, to twist texts by private interpretation until 
you get a meaning out of them that their writer never 
thought of, to adopt Swedenborg's method, and make pas- 
sages mean almost anything except what they say, — why, 
then, of course, one can get any teaching he pleases out of 
anything. The spelling-book or the dictionary might serve 



The Religion of the Bible, 147 

for a Bible, if it can be treated in that way. In one of his 
humorous letters during the war, Nasby said that the text, 
" Cursed be Canaan," and Paul's directions about returning 
the fugitive slave, Onesimus, were to be taken literally : " all 
the rest of the Bible is figurative." If one may treat as 
" figurative " whatever he does not happen to like or want to 
believe, why then, all of us can believe the Bible, and get out 
of it anything we please. But, I take it, we will all agree 
that, intellectually, this is hardly respectable, and that, mor- 
ally, it is not quite honest. 

Turning then and looking at the Bible with wide-open, 
reasonable eyes, what do we find it to be ? It contains 
snatches of rude song and fragments of custom-made law 
that are perhaps two thousand years older than Christ; and 
it is not completed for two hundred years after his time. 
Tradition, history, law, theology, ethics, proverb, idyl, poetry, 
letters, authentic, anonymous, pseudonymous, all mingled 
together! It is not a book: it is a national literature. 
Suppose I should make a compilation. Let me gather the 
fragments of far-off Saxon sagas and legal maxims; put 
in a little of the Venerable Bede, of 'Beowulf, of Chaucer; 
include some of Froissart's Chronicles and a play of 
Shakspere ; make a collection of English and American law, 
history, and poetry; let me bind them all together in one 
volume ; then let me try to gather out of it all one simple 
system of belief, in which all the variety and contradiction 
should harmonize, — what would you think of such an 
attempt? I can imagine you admiring my ingenuity, but 
it would certainly be at the expense of my judgment. Very 
like this is the effort of those who try to get out of the 
Bible one consistent system of religious teaching. The 
Bible, as I have said, is not a book, but a national literature. 
It is the biography of a race. It is predominantly a relig- 



148 Beliefs about the Bible, 

ious literature, for the simple reason that the national genius 
was predominantly religious. Their God was also king \ and 
so law and custom, politics and poetry, were all looked at 
from the theocratic stand-point. 

But this peculiar feature of the Biblical literature brings 
out in strong relief two very important facts, that we need 
carefully to note before we go on in our search. 

1. It shows us that religion is natural, a part of the nature 
of things,— something not put on like a garment, and that 
thus can be as easily thrown off. It is a part of human 
nature, and so as permanent as human nature itself. Those 
who seek for it a supernatural origin and ground render it 
a very doubtful homage and service. For if it is not an 
inherent part of human nature, but something thrust into 
the system from without, then human nature may some day 
decide to thrust it off, and get on without it. But, in reality, 
it is man's eternal search for the secret of life, his endeavor 
to get into right relation with the nature of things. 

2. The other fact is this : since it is a part of human 
nature, we should expect to find its form growing and chang- 
ing, just as the external manifestations of all the other 
elements of human nature grow and change. So, instead 
of being troubled by the early crudenesses and the kaleido- 
scopic changes in theology, these things are just what we 
ought to expect. 

There is, then, in the ordinary sense of the words, no such 
thing as "the Religion of the Bible.'' Instead of that, 
there are the religions of the Bible. Or, if you prefer 
another way of putting it, there is the eternal search for 
God, taking on ever new and higher forms and phases, to 
keep step with the growing intelligence and civilization 
of man. 

Not as exhausting, but only indicating the facts, let us now 



The Religion of the Bible, 149 

trace some of the more important features of some of the 
different religions of the Bible. 

1. As, then, we turn to the oldest traditions of the religion 
of Israel, not only do we find no Christianity, which so many 
claim to be the religion of the Bible, but we find no Judaism ; 
neither do we find even the tribal worship of Yahveh. We 
are face to face with pure and simple nature worship in its 
crudest forms. We find the traces of fetichism all around 
us, such a fetichism as to-day goes along with and indicates 
the lower barbarism of tribes like the Fijis or those of 
Central Africa. 

For example, we find the worship of sacred trees, sacred 
stones, sacred serpents, sacred animals, a sacred box or 
ark, divination like that of the old augurs, sex-worship, the 
worship of the planets, and an attempt to appease the 
ferocious god by human sacrifices. It is quite true that 
the later writers attempted to interpret all these things in 
the light of their later monotheism, just as the Catholic 
Church incorporated the older paganism, and tried to make 
it a part of Christianity. But that does not change the 
facts. The common people worshipped the sacred oaks 
at Mamre, though later times tried to explain this popular 
reverence by associating them with a supposed camping 
station of Abraham. Jacob pays reverence to a stone 
where he has a wondrous dream. Moses lifts up a brazen 
serpent, supposed to possess magical curative virtues. At 
the exodus, and even as late as after the death of Solomon, 
Yahveh is worshipped under the image of a bull. And the 
Temple itself perpetuated the remnants of the old bull- 
worship by the horns attached to the altar, and the twelve 
brazen oxen which stood under and held up the laver used 
for the sacred lustrations. The Israelite armies supposed 
they carried their god around in a box or ark. The 



150 Beliefs about the Bible, 

Philistines could capture him, and leave them defenceless 
without his aid. Rachel steals the gods of her father 
Laban, hides them under the camel furnishings in her tent, 
and sits upon them. Divination, like that of all the pagan 
nations, was practised by patriarchs, by Samuel, by David, 
by the High Priests, and even by New Testament apostles. 
Sex-worship — the Ashera, translated "grove" in the Old 
Testament, was a symbol of it — was practised with all 
kinds of abominable rites. The festival of the new moon, 
and the Sabbath itself, show the general hold of planet- 
worship on the life of the people. And Abraham, Jephthah, 
Samuel, David, and many of the later kings, illustrate the 
early practice and the very late hold on the public mind 
of human sacrifice. 

These things are not strange. Since all races have passed 
through these crude and brutal stages of religious develop- 
ment, we ought not to wonder that Israel does the same. 
Only these facts are not quite consistent with a special 
revelation, or with the notion that the Bible contains but 
one religion. 

2. After nature worship there comes a general popular 
recognition of allegiance to one god. 

This does not mean that they always worshipped only 
him, nor that that they disbelieved the existence of any 
others. It only means that they had adopted him as their 
tribal god. That they continued to worship others is 
apparent all the way through the Old Testament. The 
prophets are always rebuking them for it, and their calami- 
ties are always being attributed to it. Though, on this 
theory, it is a little strange that an idolatrous king like 
Manasseh has a long and prosperous reign, while the faithful 
servant of Yahveh, like Josiah, is cut off in disastrous 
defeat. 



The Religion of the Bible. 151 

As long as they believed in the real existence and power 
of other gods, it is hardly strange that they should try to 
win their favor. Mr. Conway tells us of a Christian woman 
in England who always bows when the devil's name is 
mentioned ; prudently arguing that, if he really exists and is 
as powerful as he is represented, it may be just as well to 
keep on the right side of him. 

Some of the very texts that are frequently quoted to 
prove a monotheistic belief on the part of the Jews, in 
reality prove just the opposite. Yahveh is " King of kings 
and Lord of lords," a "great King above all gods." The 
lords and gods over whom he is supreme must exist, or such 
words mean nothing. 

And it is absurd, also, to try to think that the god of Sam- 
uel and David is the same being as the god of the second 
Isaiah and of Jesus. The older conception is of a being 
who comes down on earth, as Jupiter and Mercury used to 
do, and walks about, talks, and eats like a man. He is 
jealous ; he is ignorant, having to go down to Babel and 
Sodom to see what is going on ; he makes mistakes and 
repents ; he likes the smell of a burning ox offered in 
sacrifice ; he rejoices over the destruction of an enemy like 
a red-handed tribal war-chief. 

3. But, as ages go by, and the people rise to a higher 
type of civilization, the popular god is transformed, and 
reflects this higher type of civilization. We are face to face 
with a spiritual mo?iotheism. To the higher prophets, only 
one god really exists : " All the gods of the nations 
are idols." They have ears, eyes, hands, and feet; but 
they neither hear, see, handle, nor walk. And this 
higher god cares nothing for their sacrifices nor the smell 
of their burnt offerings. He only wants truth in the inward 
parts and righteousness of life. How different he from 



152 Beliefs about the Bible, 

the old god who himself inspired prophets to lie, glorified 
treachery, sanctioned rape, and took delight in the blood 
of his enemies ! The highest peak of the Old Testament 
is reached when Micah proclaims, "What doth the Lord 
require of thee, but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk 
humbly with thy God ? " 

Here is a religion of simple moral monotheism, — one god 
only, and he to be worshipped only by lofty-souled reverence 
and human goodness. 

4. But Israel does not remain on this lofty table-land of 
noble thought and pure devotion. From this time on to 
the birth of Jesus there is a declension toward the lower 
level of legalism, ritual, and ceremony. The free inspiration 
of the prophets has died out, and they begin to look back 
and live on the past. Instead of being themselves inspired, 
they worship the records of a past inspiration. Sacrifices 
and tithes and petty observances take the place of character 
and noble deeds. They quarrel over such questions as to 
how often and in what ways they shall wash their hands. 
They measure off the precise distance which it is permitted 
one to walk on the Sabbath. They wear charms about 'their 
persons, made up of magical texts of Scripture. They 
buy supposed merit at the expense of long and tedious 
prayers. They hamper every hour of the day with some 
petty observance, to break over which they think will incur 
the anger of their god. 

But what a god he must be to care for such humdrum 
boy's play as all this ! This is the second childhood of a 
religion, the decrepitude of an age that can only sit by the 
fireside, and tell over what it has done. 

And, in all these forms of the older religions, one impor- 
tant fact is to be specially remarked. Those who talk about 
" the religion of the Bible " are accustomed to tell us that 



The Religion of the Bible. 153 

the one object of it ail is to save our souls in the next world. 
But, throughout these four forms of religion to be so clearly 
traced in the Old Testament, soul-saving in the next world 
has played no part at all. Until the very last there was no 
popular belief in or teaching about any next world at all. 
Until within two thousand years, then, this same God (as 
the popular faith teaches), who is now so anxious to have us 
save our souls, never told the world, never told his chosen 
people, that they had any souls, or that there was any next 
world ! When these old Jews come up to judgment and 
ask God why he did not let them know about it, what will 
he answer ? Is it not even absurd for men who claim to be 
intelligent to tell us that two religions, the sole object of 
one of which is to save people in the other world, and the 
other of w r hich does not teach any other world at all, are still 
one and the same ? Jewish rewards and punishments, down 
almost to the time of Christ, were all confined to this w r orld. 

5. But now we have come to still another and a new relig- 
ion. Jewish hopes and Persian dreams have wrought 
together. Pagan speculations and Israelite apocalypses, like 
the Book of Enoch, have filled the air with vague expecta- 
tions. The people are looking, either through revolution on 
earth or an avatar from heaven, for the coming of an ideal 
kingdom. John appears in the desert, proclaiming that "the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand." The young Jesus appears 
at his baptism, and is designated as the expected Messianic 
king. He accepts the supposed prophetic appointment. 
But he carries it out in such a way that even John begins to 
doubt if he is really the one, and sends messengers from his 
prison at Machaerus to ask him. 

What, now, really was the religion of Jesus ? In a word, it 
was this. Through his instrumentality, God was soon to usher 
in, suddenly and by miracle, a kingdom of heaven. It was 



154 Beliefs about the Bible. 

to be established on earth. The terms of admission to its 
divine citizenship were very simple. Not a word about 
Trinity or atonement, — only acceptance of him as the Mes- 
siah ; repentance, or a practical change of life so far as it 
had been evil ; and the practical living out of moral good- 
ness as he understood and taught it. The dark side of it 
was — if it be really true that Jesus taught it — the going 
away of those who refused his conditions " into everlasting 
punishment, prepared for the devil and his angels." To 
Jesus, the devil was as real a being as God ; and he undoubt- 
edly accepted the superstition of his time as to the demoniacal 
origin of disease. 

Here, then, is a religion entirely distinct from anything the 
Old Testament contains, and also almost altogether unlike 
anything that later ages have called by the name of 
Christian. 

I am aware that large numbers of people attempt to alle- 
gorize these facts all away. But it seems to me neither 
scholarship nor plain dealing to torture the language of 
Jesus into conformity with modern thought, as long' as it is 
perfectly well known that this same modern thought was 
unheard of in that age. The language of Jesus is to be 
interpreted in the light of the beliefs and ideas prevalent at 
the time he lived and spoke. I am then compelled to be- 
lieve that, in the historic sense of the word, Jesus himself 
was not a Christian. He was a theist, pure and simple ; or, 
in the sense that he believed in only one God, a Unitarian. 

6. But the New Testament contains the fruitful germs and 
outlines of another religion still. There is, first, the religion 
of Jesus ; and then, after that, there is a religion about Jesus. 
Jesus himself did not teach what has come to be called Chris- 
tianity ; but Christianity, formed of many composite elements, 
grew up around the belief that Jesus was the Messiah, and so 



The Religion of the Bible. 155 

made his Messiahship, the C/iristos, its central doctrine. 
Hence the name. It was the crystallized result of the 
flowing together of many speculative ingredients, pagan, 
Jewish, philosophic. It started with the idea of " the king- 
dom of God," just as Jesus did. At first, it was to be here 
on earth \ then, after long waiting and many disappointments, 
it was transferred to the other world. But it radically di- 
verged from the teaching of Jesus in regard to the condi- 
tions of entrance into that kingdom. The man Jesus was 
changed into a god \ and about this central article of faith 
there clustered an aggregation of mystic, philosophic, and 
speculative beliefs, the acceptance of all of which became 
the condition of salvation. Around these beliefs grew a 
thorny hedge of ceremonial, as tangled and luxuriant in 
its development as the world had ever seen. The guard- 
ians of these became dominant, and made it so hard to be 
saved that hell grew populous and heaven exceedingly lone- 
some. 

Then, as ages went by, came revolt, and the multiplication 
of sects, each one claiming it had the whole gospel. And, as 
each one emphasized this doctrine or that, the conditions of 
salvation became multiplied and bewildering. It was faith, 
it was works, it was ritual and sacrament, it was the blood, 
it was one thing or another according to the church you at- 
tended or the preacher you heard. All pointed to the Bible ; 
and, since all these things are in the Bible, it is not very 
strange that those who look should find almost anything 
that they desire. 

Dr. George E. Ellis has recently raised the question — and 
a storm at the same time — as to whether the Bible is ortho- 
dox. You might as well ask as to whether English Litera- 
ture is orthodox. It is, and it is not. It all depends upon 
what part of it you read. If you fix your attention on one 



156 Beliefs about the Bible, 

phase of teaching, and if you then consider everything that 
contradicts that as figurative, why, then, it becomes compara- 
tively easy to harmonize the whole around a few ideas. But, 
if you take the Bible for what it is, — a national religious 
literature, — you will cease talking about "the religion of the 
Bible." You will trace the upward steps and stages of 
growth in religion, as well as in all other things ; and, look- 
ing forward instead of behind, you will learn to believe that 
God is really alive to-day, and that his last word is not yet 
spoken. 



THE MORALITY OF THE BIBLE. 



I wish to give expression to just one word of preface 
before beginning the treatment of my theme, lest the purpose 
that I have in view, and the method of carrying out that 
purpose, shall be misunderstood. If we could only take 
this grand old book for what it really is, for what it really 
claims to be, how gladly would I spend my time not in 
criticism, but in eulogy; for it occupies a unique position 
in the history of our race. On the basis of what it claims 
to be, there is no grander book in the world. You will 
understand then that, in what I am about to do this morn- 
ing, I am not criticising the Bible, I am not finding fault 
with its ethical teaching ; I am only criticising a theory, a 
conception of the Bible, a teaching about it, which has 
dominated the world for centuries, and which, as I believe, 
stands in the way of the world's further and nobler progress. 



There are two questions that must be asked and answered, 
in order that we may understand the position which this 
book holds in regard to the ethical teachings of the world. 

In the first place, does the Bible contain one, and only 
one, system of ethical teaching? Is the teaching in the 
early part of the book the same as that of the middle and 
latter part? Are there no signs of progress and growth 



158 Beliefs abozct the Bible. 

such as we find connected with the other religions of the 
world ? 

The next question is: Is the highest ethical teaching of 
the Bible perfect and complete, meeting the wants of the 
nineteenth century, and capable of satisfying the needs of 
any possible development of human life and thought in the 
future? If the Bible contains one system, and only one, 
and if that one system is perfect and divine, then we should 
be able to believe, when we take this book in our hands, 
that we actually held a divine and infallible revelation. But, 
if there is more than one system, and if one system is higher 
than another • if there are traces and evidences of growth, 
and if the highest teaching is not complete and perfect for 
all time, — why then, of course, we shall not be able to believe 
that we have an infallible and divine revelation of moral 
truth. They who deal in apology or defence of the Bible 
talk to us of a progressive revelation. But a " progressive 
revelation " is an absurdity, on the theory of a divine and 
infallible one. If, for example, God gave light and guidance 
to the Hebrews only so fast and so far as they were intellect- 
ually developed enough to appreciate it, so that they received 
comparatively the same kind of light that other nations 
received at the same stage or degree of development, then 
we are reduced to the absurdity of supposing that God 
reveals truth only as fast as people are capable of finding it 
out for themselves; which of course is a contradiction in 
terms. These, then, are the two questions. 

Leaving one side, now, for the moment, all thought of a 
divine revelation of moral truth, looking abroad over the 
world and tracing the origin and development of ethical 
principles, we find this one thing everywhere plainly to be 
observed : In all parts of the world, among nations that have 
reached substantially the same level of intelligence, the same 



The Morality of the Bible. 159 

grade of civilization, and are in substantially similar circum- 
stances of life, we find substantially the same ethical princi- 
ples and precepts. That is, people in China, when they 
had risen to a certain level of intellectual and moral devel- 
opment, held substantially the same ideas of character and 
conduct that people in Egypt held, when they had reached 
the same level or a similar one. We find the same natural 
process of growth at work as in the vegetable world. If 
you climb up the sides of the Alps, so many feet above the 
level of the sea, and then climb up the same height above 
the level of the sea on the sides of the Andes, if you do not 
find the same vegetable growths, you find corresponding ones, 
in similar circumstances. This is the method of nature. 

If, then, we should find no revelation touching the matter 
of right and wrong, we should expect to find this principle 
at work everywhere. Outside of the Bible, we do find this 
principle at work. We find in similar circumstances, ia 
similar grades of development, and in similar grades of intel- 
ligence, similar precepts and principles. If we shall find 
substantially the same thing true concerning the Bible, then, 
of course, we must surrender the idea that here is anything 
supernatural or exceptional. We must place Bible ethics in 
the same natural category and classification with all the rest 
that we can discover. 

Before discussing Bible ethics, simply as a suggestion, a 
hint of what may be found in other places, as a sort of back- 
ground to my thought, I wish to give you two or three speci- 
mens of the ethics of ancient Egypt, that you may see what 
kind of ideas, what sort of conception of God and duty, men 
were capable of attaining and really did attain three thousand 
years at least before Christ was born. In the first quotation 
that I shall make, you will perceive their conception of God. 
This, of course, while a part of religion, is also a part of 



l6o Beliefs about the Bible. 



* 



ethics. If you can find out what sort of character men 
attribute to God, you will find a reflection on the sky of their 
own moral conceptions of that which is highest and best. 
Within recent years, a large part of the sacred literature of 
ancient Egypt has been recovered. On monuments, in 
papyrus rolls, on tombs, and preserved in many different 
ways, have been found sayings which date back beyond the 
popularly supposed period of the occurence of the flood, — 
perhaps some of them older than the creation itself, as dated 
by the popular chronology. 

Here are a few of these sayings, — the first addressed to 
God : — 

" Every one glorifies thy goodness. Mild is thy love toward us : thy 
tenderness surrounds our hearts. Great is thy love in all the souls of 
men." m 

"Let not thy face be turned away from us : the joy of our hearts is to 
contemplate thee. Chase all anguish from our hearts. He wipes tears 
from off all faces." 

" Hail to thee, Ra, Lord of all truth ; who listeneth to the poor in his 
•distress ; gentle of heart, when we cry to thee ; deliverer of the timid 
man from the violent ; judging the poor, the poor and the oppressed; 
sovereign of life, health, and strength." 

" The heart of man is no secret to him that made it. He is present 
ivith thee, though thou be alone." 

Then here is a fragment from an inscription on a tomb, 
giving the idea of the writer as to what kind of life he should 
have lived : — 

" I honored my father and my mother. I loved my brothers. I taught 
little children. I took care of orphans as though they had been my own 
children." 

There has been recently brought to light, from the ruins 
of that old civilization, almost a complete work, called the 
Maxims of Ptahhotep, which dates from the age of the 



The Morality of the Bible, 161 

Pyramids, and which even then refers to the authority of 
ancient times. It is the most ancient book in the world, 
as far as is known. Renouf, the great French Egyptian 
scholar, says that " they inculcate the study of wisdom, the 
duty to parents and superiors, respect for property, the 
advantages of charitableness, peaceableness and content, 
of liberality, humility, chastity, and sobriety, of truthfulness 
and justice. " M. Chabas, who first gave the book to the 
world, says : " None of the Christian virtues is forgotten in 
it: piety, charity, gentleness, self-command in word and 
action, chastity, the protection of the weak, benevolence 
toward the humble, deference to superiors, respect for 
property in its minutest details, — all is expressed there, 
and in extremely clear language." 

/We cannot resist drawing the inference from this that, if 
ancient Egypt three thousand years before Christ was capa- 
ble, without a revelation, of attaining to a knowledge and, 
in some degree, to a practice of all the finest so-called Chris- 
tian virtues, it is hardly possible to make out any necessity 
for a revelation, in order to teach these a thousand or two 
years later to another people. 

Had I time, I would like to place beside these one speci- 
men from the Mahdbhdrata, the great Indian or Hindu epic. 
There is one selection which I am obliged to think is finer, 
higher, more humane than anything which the whole Bible 
contains. It represents one of seven brothers, the last of 
the seven, standing at the entrance to the Indian heaven. 
His six brothers, his wife, and his faithful dog, the constant 
companions of his life, have fallen by the way; and he 
stands alone at the gates. The gods come down to welcome 
him ; and there is a throne waiting him, vacant till he shall 
occupy it. They bid him come in, but he stands there, and 
asks the gods what is to become of his brothers, his wife, 



1 62 Beliefs about the Bible, 

and his dog ; and, until he is assured that they also shall 
share his bliss and his glory, he turns his back on the 
heavens, and refuses to enter. I know of nothing in all 
religious literature higher, finer, grander than that. Cer- 
tainly, it compares most favorably with the old Puritan 
picture of the saints leaning over the battlements of heaven, 
and enjoying the spectacle and listening to the groans of 
their brethren in eternal torments below. 

I now turn, to treat, as briefly as I can, some suggestions 
concerning the moral teachings of the Old Testament and 
the New. 

i. First, let us look at the Old Testament, and attempt to 
answer my first question, whether there is one system of 
teaching in the Bible, whether the Old Testament teaches 
the same as the New. Of course, in so brief a review, I 
must omit many points. I only intend to take up specimens 
here and there. 

One of the first things we come across is the doctrine of 
revenge, or retaliation. We find in the Old Testament that 
practice which, in Southern Europe, in tales of love and pas- 
sion, we are familiar with as the vendetta, or the duty of the 
living relatives of a man who has been murdered, or killed 
by accident, to pursue and relentlessly revenge the death of 
the murdered man. We find this taught and indorsed by 
Yahveh himself, who goes so far as to establish certain 
cities of refuge where a man might flee, provided he had 
killed a man by accident, or, as we should say, in case of 
justifiable homicide. If he were caught before he reached 
that city, it was justifiable to put him to death, even if 
he had not intended to commit murder. That is a part of 
the social morality of the Old Testament. Would we con- 
sider that up to the level of the best life of the nineteenth 
century ? The New York Nation has been calling very 



The Morality of the Bible. 163 

vigorous and earnest attention to practices similar to this 
in the South, treating them as evidence of savagery, and 
calling upon the South to cleanse its skirts from these relics 
of barbarism before they can expect that civilized people will 
go there to live, or invest their capital among them. This, 
then, is instinctively pronouncing judgment on this kind of 
ethics by the conscience of the modern world. 

Turn to another institution which is taught and indorsed 
and regulated by God himself in the Old Testament, the 
system of polygamy. If the Bible were to be treated like 
any other book, I should not have a word to say against 
polygamy in the Old Testament. There was a time when 
it was moral. If you trace the upward growth of social life, 
you will find that man began several grades lower down 
than polygamy ; and polygamy is a step in advance of that 
which preceded it. It is part way up the ladder from where 
the human race began toward the position we now occupy. 
I should have nothing against polygamy as part of the proc- 
ess of the social development of the world. We criticise 
it to-day only because the world has outgrown it. It was 
well enough in its time and place • but the world has now 
higher moral conceptions of social order, and so looks down 
on that as something belonging to a barbaric past. You 
know how we look upon the Mormons to-day, what a blot 
we consider it on the national escutcheon, how we apologize 
for it and hope to outgrow it and leave it behind, how we are 
ashamed of it in the face of Europe ; and yet it is recognized 
by God himself, taught, arranged for, ordered by him. We 
find ourselves, on the orthodox theory, in the curious position 
of apologizing for God, if that is a part of an infallible and 
eternal revelation. 

Leaving that, we come to slavery. Slavery is recognized 
in the Old Testament as right. The people are permitted 



164 Beliefs about the Bible. 

not only to buy strangers, but their own race, other Jews. 
There is one slight mitigation, when they are dealing with 
their own brethren. Although they were permitted to buy 
and hold a Jew as a slave, after six years he was set free by 
the limitation of the law concerning him. But, if he were 
married and had become the father of children, if he chose 
to go out and take his liberty, he had to leave his wife and 
family still in slavery, — a diabolically ingenious device for 
keeping him in slavery himself ; for no true man would leave 
his wife and children, and take his freedom on those terms. 

In regard to slavery, I should say precisely as concerning 
polygamy. If I might treat it from the stand-point of the 
natural development of the world, it would need no apology 
in the Old Testament. Slavery itself was once relatively 
right. It was relatively better than that type of social life 
which preceded it. It took the place of the indiscriminate 
slaughter of one's enemies in time of war. It was a definite, 
distinct step upward in social evolution ; and I should not 
be called to apologize for it, if people did not tell me that 
it was a part of the divine revelation. If it were, it must 
be not only good for that age, but for any and every age. 

Let us next consider the Old Testament code of morals 
concerning other nations in time of war. God permits — nay, 
he commands — wars of absolute extermination. He com- 
mands them to put to death men, women, and children, 
infants in arms, gray-headed age, even to destroy the very 
cattle and everything which had belonged to the tribe with 
which they were at war. Merciless massacre is part of the 
ethics of the Old Testament. Would we consider anything 
like that as justified for a moment in regard to the relations 
which nations maintain with each other in the nineteenth 
century ? If there were a respectable people on the face of 
the earth capable of carrying on war as it is carried on there, 



The Morality of the Bible. 165 

under divine guidance and orders, the civilized world would 
rush to arms to compel that nation to be humane. 

One other point. I have said that the conception which 
any people hold concerning God is a part of its morality, 
because the character of the deity is a reflection of the char- 
acter of the people themselves. What kind of character, 
then, must we attribute to these old Jews, when we look at 
the kind of god who reveals himself through a large part of 
the Old Testament, — a god who is jealous, a god who likes 
flattery, a god who is cruel, a god who takes delight in the 
cries of slaughtered victims and in the smell of their blood 
and the smoke of their burnings, a god who permits and 
accepts human sacrifices, a god who teaches his own proph- 
ets to lie, a god who commands rape, a god guilty of almost 
every crime. Of course, this does not exhaust the Old 
Testament teaching concerning God. You will not mis- 
understand me so crudely as that. There is no finer teach- 
ing concerning God than some parts of the Old Testament 
furnish, — none loftier, none nobler, none more beautiful: 
only these things are also there. They are a part of the 
book. And, if the book is divine and infallible revelation, 
then these are divine and infallible revelations of moral 
truth, because they are a part of the record. I need not 
enlarge upon this point, in order to enforce upon your thought 
and feeling the conviction that the Jews made progress just 
like all other people : only we find them here in their period 
of barbaric semi-development, and so we find barbaric morals, 
just as we find them in Asia, Africa, or in Europe, among 
our own brutalized and barbaric forefathers. There is the 
finger-marks of a natural growth in moral ideals, precepts, 
and principles all through the Old Testament, from the 
lowest beginning up to the sublime spiritual conceptions 
of the second Isaiah, as high and lofty a flight as the world 
contains. 



1 66 Beliefs about the Bible. 

2. Let us now come to the consideration of the second 
question. If there is any perfect morality anywhere in the 
Bible, we shall expect to find it in the New Testament. It 
is a very common opinion — the liberal orthodox are begin- 
ning to share it and stand by it — that, while the Old Testa- 
ment contains much that is barbaric and outgrown, the New 
Testament, at any rate, is perfect. I think it is the opinion 
of large numbers, perhaps the majority, of liberals, even if 
they reject the dogmatic teachings of the New Testament, 
that the highest part of it is supreme, perfect, final, and 
cannot be outgrown. I think it is a very common feeling, 
on the part of liberal Christians generally, that Jesus was an 
absolutely sinless, perfect being, and that he gave a perfect 
system of ethics to the world. I shall not argue the question 
of his own character, as it is not a part of my theme. I will 
frankly express to you my opinion that I know no reason 
why I should suppose that Jesus of Nazareth was absolutely 
free from error and human frailty. I know no reason why I 
should suppose that he was perfect in every particular. 
Sublime, God-conscious, noble, sweet, pure, true, — yes ; yet 
I think there are evident traces in the New Testament of 
his sharing the limitations, the prejudices, the mistakes, and 
the common frailties of man. 

But, say a great many, the Sermon on the Mount, at least, 
is faultless. I think it is a common opinion, among those of 
the liberal faith, that the Sermon on the Mount is a perfect 
standard of moral truth. They hold it up before the world, 
and demand the intellectual and moral homage of mankind 
for everything which it contains. But, as I study it, I 
cannot so regard it. The New Testament contains in es- 
sence, in germ, some of the highest and finest principles 
that the world has ever seen. If the saying of Jesus con- 
cerning loving God and man with all the heart could be 



The Morality of the Bible. 167 

expanded and carried out practically, with all the light of 
the growing intelligence of the world ; if it could enter into 
all the details of human character, — it would make a perfect 
world ; but a system of ethics is not to be judged by some 
germ principle, but by the interpretation of that principle as 
it falls from the lips of the teacher himself. 

Let us, then, test this Sermon on the Mount in two or 
three directions, by looking at some of the specific applica- 
tions of ethical principles which fall from the lips of Jesus. 

Before I pass to specify those parts, I wish to make one 
or two remarks concerning the attitude which the world 
holds toward this wondrous discourse. I do not believe 
there is a single orthodox person or church in the world, 
which even tries, strictly and literally, to obey the Sermon on 
the Mount. If any body of people, any city, any town, any 
tribe, any nation, should attempt to carry out these teachings 
literally, it would bring the world, as far as they were con- 
cerned, to a stand-still. In other words, many of those prin- 
ciples are simply impracticable. They never have been 
carried out and never can be in this kind of a world. Those 
who laud them the most never think of trying to obey them. 
Let us now specify a few particulars. 

Jesus teaches us, as plain as language can express it, 
improvidence, lack of forethought, lack of careful provision 
for the future. Again, the doctrine of charity which is here 
inculcated has perhaps wrought more evil in the past history 
of the world than much of the hard-heartedness and cruelty 
of the rich. I am perfectly well aware that men attempt 
to reinterpret all these sayings and make them mean what 
they think they ought to mean ; but it seems to me that the 
true and just and common-sense canon of criticism would 
lead us to judge these sayings of Jesus in the light of the 
thought of his time, not in the light of the thought of ours. 



1 68 Beliefs about the Bible. 

So judging them, we are to take them literally. We are to 
take him as meaning what he says. He says, " Take no 
thought for the morrow." I know that they translate that, 
" Be not anxious about the morrow " ; but, even if I grant 
so much, still the world could not get on by literally obeying 
it. The world must be anxious about the morrow. The 
world must take thought. The world must provide for the 
future. The very distinction between barbarism and civil- 
ization is that the barbarian obeys this principle, and the 
civilized man never did, does not, and never can. One of 
the highest marks of civilization is that men have planned, 
forecast, traced the present working causes to their possible 
consequences, and provided against the future. We cannot 
live in this world like lilies and birds, unless we are trans- 
formed into lilies and birds. We are men, factors in a com- 
plex civilization, and the principles which apply to these 
things do not apply to us. 

Jesus teaches us that, if we trust in the Father, if we ask, 
we shall receive ; that we are to care only for the kingdom 
of heaven ; that we are to make no provision for the morrow. 
That is the simple, ingenuous teaching of Jesus. In his 
doctrine of giving, he says : " Give to him that asketh thee, 
and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou 
away." Lend, asking for nothing again, expecting nothing. 
That is, if anybody comes and asks you for anything, let 
him Lave it without any regard to ever receiving it again. 
That is the simple teaching ; and we know that is most likely 
to have been the meaning of Jesus, because these ideas were 
all in the air at the time. The young man comes to him, and 
asks, " What shall I do to inherit eternal life ? " And his 
reply is, " Go, sell everything thou hast, and give to the 
poor." If a man should obey literally that direction to-day, 
he would be considered a public enemy. This doctrine of 



The Morality of the Bible. 169 

charity, as far as carried out, has always tended to create 
permanent pauperism. If it were carried out in all its liter- 
alness, it would fill the world with irresponsible lazzaroni. 
It is sometimes said that these teachings were intended to 
be only local and temporary in their application. If so, it is 
at least a serious defect that a statement of that fact is not 
plainly made. 

Take the next step, the teaching of Jesus concerning 
poverty and riches in general, which is very near akin to this. 
The doctrine of the New Testament all the way through is 
that riches are evil. "Blessed are the poor." " Woe unto 
you that are rich, for you have received your consolation." 
"Blessed are they that weep now, for they shall laugh." 
"Woe unto those that laugh, for they shall weep." Take the 
parable of the rich man and Lazarus. It is ordinarily 
assumed that Lazarus was somehow a very virtuous man, 
and that Dives was a bad man. Jesus does not say one 
single word about Dives being a bad man. There is not a 
charge brought against him, except that he was rich. He 
does not say anything about Lazarus being a good man. 
There is no praise for him, except that he was poor. When 
they get into the next world, Dives is not told that he is 
to suffer in consequence of his having been a sinner; 
but Abraham says to him, " Remember, in your lifetime, you 
had your good things, and Lazarus evil things : now, he is 
comforted, and you are tormented." Not a word about good 
or bad. Dives is simply punished to make things even, and 
Lazarus rewarded to make things even. All the way through 
the New Testament, there is a very apparent antipathy to 
wealth ; and the Catholic Church has rightly interpreted it, 
in making voluntary poverty one of the Christian virtues. 
Yet modern civilization has developed the fact, beyond pos- 
sibility of question, that wealth, the accumulated resources 



170 Beliefs about the Bible. 

of the world, lies at the very base and is the prime and 
essential condition of all civilization. There is no possi- 
bility of man being civilized until there is a little saved 
beyond what is needed to eat up or wear out for the day. 
There is no chance for schools, for music, for art, for educa- 
tion, no chance for anything beyond taking care of man as 
an animal, until there is some wealth saved in the world. 
Lay not up for yourselves riches on earth, only care about 
riches in the next world, says the New Testament. I think 
it is a very good idea to look out for both ; but the world 
would come to a stand-still, and civilization would be under- 
mined and a failure, if those precepts were literally carried out. 

Let me turn to another ethical principle, touching marriage 
and divorce. I think it is generally taken for granted that 
the New Testament is impervious to criticism here, if no- 
where else ; and yet it seems to me that this is far from true. 
Jesus' doctrine of divorce is one that no Protestant nation 
has ever dared to incorporate into law or carry out in prac- 
tice. Yet they claim to be Christian in their methods of 
legislation. 

Jesus says you shall put away your wife for one cause and 
one only ; but, mark you, he does not make any provision 
for the wife putting away her husband at all ! The New 
Testament doctrine of divorce is entirely one-sided. The 
wife is not permitted to put away her husband for any cause. 

Another point. Not simply in the teaching of the Book 
of Revelation and of Paul, but in the teaching of Jesus him- 
self, marriage does not occupy the highest social rank. It 
is a little under a cloud. There is something else that is 
better. Jesus himself says that, if a man is able to receive 
it, the celibate life is superior to the married one. PauFs 
direction about marriage is that it is better to marry than to 
do worse. In the Book of Revelation, the one hundred and 



The Morality of the Bible, 171 

forty-four thousand peculiar saints set apart from all the rest, 
even in heaven, who have the highest seats and to whom 
special honor is given, are those who have lived perfectly 
virginal lives. The doctrine is that the celibate has superior 
sanctity. It puts us in the position of thinking that God 
has made us what we are, and then is ready to teach us that, 
if we go against the laws of the natures he has given us, 
and do something else, we shall gain his favor more certainly 
than as though we carried out the laws that he himself has 
made. The New Testament thus, it seems to me, contains 
the germs of all European monasticism and asceticism and 
justifies them, and therefore is no guide for the practical 
morality of the world to-day in these respects. 

There is another point. Let us take the teaching of the 
New Testament concerning resistance to evil ; the doctrine 
concerning the citizen's relation to government. What is 
it? "Resist not evil." The Quaker is the only man that 
attempts to carry out the doctrine of the New Testament in 
this direction ; and, if all the world were Quakers, we might 
possibly get along with it, though I question whether, even 
then, it would not be a pretty tame, poor kind of a world. 
Through resistance to injur}', resistance to tyrants, fighting 
for liberty, fighting for right, has the civilization of the world 
grown. Paul says : " He that resisteth the power resisteth the 
ordinance of God." " The powers that be are ordained of 
God." That is substantially the New Testament doctrine. 
The powers that be are manifestations of the will of God, 
and resistance to tyranny and injury of any kind is un- 
christian. Yet look back down the pathway of the ages up 
which our ancestors have trod, leading to the grand ideas 
of freedom and civilization which we hold to-day. See the 
barons at Runnymede demanding from King John the con- 
cessions of the Magna Charta. The influence of the New 



172 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Testament would have been on the side of the weak-minded, 
vacillating, unscrupulous, tyrannous John. Come down to 
the period of the Commonwealth, and see Cromwell with his 
Roundheads fighting against King Charles. The old Eng- 
lish Church was only logical when, after the death of the 
king and the restoration, at the end of CromwelPs rule, it 
inserted a special passage in the Book of Common Prayer 
in memory of the blessed saint and martyr King Charles. 
The Puritans,*according to the New Testament ethics, were 
wrong in resisting the divine right and authority of the king. 
We were wrong at the time of the Revolution. The French 
were wrong when they threw off the mountainous tyranny 
of ages, and stood up at last free men. Do you know the 
world has come to the vantage-ground of civilization by not 
being literally obedient to the Sermon on the Mount? Men 
have reasoned, out of their own experience, laws of right 
and truth which have been spoken of God through the 
mouthpiece of the events of the time ; and these have super- 
seded any teachings that preceded them. 

I must touch one other point. The dominant teaching of 
the New Testament was other-worldly. It cast slight and 
contempt on this life, the flesh, and everything concerning 
it. Of course, then, there was no place in it for anything 
like that spirit of truth, that spirit of investigation into 
natural phenomena and forces, such as have come to grand 
embodiment in the modern science of the world. The 
teaching of the New Testament is that faith is one of the 
highest virtues. When Jesus reappeared to his disciples, 
Thomas did what any one would do to-day : he asked proof 
of a stupendous miracle. And — though Jesus forgives him, 
forgives him for a virtue — he is represented as saying to 
him, "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have 
believed." Blessed are those who shut their eyes, and 



The Morality of the Bible. 173 

accept that which is given them as truth. We want no such 
blessing in the modern world. The experience of the civ- 
ilized world is crowning doubt among the virtues, placing it 
as high as faith. It is just as much a duty to doubt a thing 
that is not true or proved as to believe a thing that is 
proved. This spirit, then, of modern investigation, of de- 
manding credentials of that which claims to be truth, of 
investigating nature, her laws and forces, recognizing the 
fact that it is by knowing what these are and getting into 
right relations with them that the noblest civilization of the 
world is built up, — this whole scale of virtues, so to speak, 
on which so large a part of the best things in the world 
depend, are not New Testament virtues at all. This is some- 
thing that the modern world has developed since that day, 
something that could not have been known then because 
the world had not then attained its majority, and was not 
free to look over the universe for itself. 

The New Testament, then, does not contain, it seems to 
me, a final, perfectly developed system of ethical teaching. 
I wish not to criticise it or to find fault with it. I have not 
a word of fault to find with it, judged by the standard of the 
age and time. Do not understand me as attempting to pick 
flaws in the character and teachings of Jesus. I only say 
that the first century is not the nineteenth ; that God is alive, 
and has been alive for nineteen hundred years ; and, if the 
world has made any progress, it is perfectly natural that we 
should be in advance of the people who lived nearly two 
thousand years ago. That is infidelity, that is lack of faith 
in God, that takes the ground that the world is not making 
any progress ; that in two thousand years we have done 
nothing and come to nothing, but have been simply running 
around in a little circle, ending where we began. I believe 
in the theory of the divine Life and its relation to this 



174 Beliefs about the Bible. 

world that teaches us that God is perpetually before us as 
Leader ; that the new experiences which he gives us in each 
generation of time give new conceptions of right and wrong, 
higher views of God and man and duty, something nobler 
and better than the world has ever seen until to-day. 

Were it in the' line of my theme, and had I time, I should 
love to dwell upon the other side, to point out what I regard 
as original, grand, and permanent in the ethics of Jesus. 
But I have had another object this morning, — that of test- 
ing the perfection of the New Testament teachings. And I 
ask that what I have said may be judged in the light of 
that purpose. 



The Present Use and Worth of the Bible. 



No one who is familiar with the results of modern criti- 
cism, scientific investigation, and historic research, can pos- 
sibly hereafter hold the same theory concerning the Bible 
which has so long dominated the brain and the conscience 
of the world. The Bible has come down, in one sense, from 
that lofty pedestal of power and unique supremacy on which 
it has stood ; and it must henceforth take its place, to be 
judged by the same rules of criticism, along with all the 
other sacred literatures of the world. That is not by any 
means saying that the other sacred literatures of the world 
are as good as the Bible. When I say that one of the Cali- 
fornia big trees is to be studied in precisely the same way 
as an ordinary pine-tree or wayside shrub, that it is just as 
natural as they, that it has developed according to precisely 
the same methods, and is to be studied after the same prin- 
ciples of botany and of vegetable growth, I do not say that 
the California tree is no higher, no grander, no more won- 
drous than the wayside shrub. The Bible takes its place 
alongside all the other literatures of the world ; and it will 
demonstrate its fitness to stand above them, overlooking 
them, grander, higher than they, provided it is fitted to 
occupy this position. And this certainly is all that any be- 
liever in it can rationally desire. The Bible can no longer 
be regarded as an infallible inspiration concerning religious 



176 Beliefs about the Bible. 

truth. It can no longer be regarded as an ultimate standard 
of judgment concerning ethics. It is no longer scientific au- 
thority. It is no longer unimpeachable as an historic record 
of a people whose life it details through the course of so 
many changing centuries. 

What then ? Are we reduced to the alternative that has 
been so many times held up for us, — the whole Bible ac- 
cording to the old ideas of it, or nothing ? Are we to wor- 
ship the Bible, or else fling it to the rubbish-heap ? Must we 
read it as infallible all the way through, from cover to cover, 
or else never read it at all ? Is it treating it as God's word in 
«very sentence, phrase, and letter, or else as no longer worth 
the attention of rational men ? I am perfectly well aware, 
as are you, that this alternative is very commonly pointed 
out to us, and we are expected to choose the one or the 
other. For my part, I decline to be thrust through by either 
iiorn of such an unreasonable dilemma. 

There are two main questions that I want to ask you to 
consider with me this morning. Has this change which has 
come over the position and estimate of the Bible been pro- 
ductive of loss or gain to the modern world ? This is the 
first question. That is, are we richer or poorer than we 
were as the result of criticism concerning the Bible ? 

The next question is, Of what use and value is this Bible 
to the man who looks upon it simply as human literature, 
developed according to the laws of the other literatures of 
the world ? 

I. Take these two questions in their order. We are per- 
petually told that, if we give up the Bible, — and by giving 
up the Bible is meant giving up a particular theory about it 
and a particular use of it, — we have lost all hope, all ground- 
work for religion, ail basis for ethics, all reason for belief 
and trust in God, all ground for hope in a future life. The 



Present Use and Worth. 177 

warning cry is constantly rung in our ears that it must be the 
old theory of the Bible in its entirety, or else blank religious 
and moral darkness, "without God and without hope in the 
world." So far from accepting this, I am one of those who 
believe that the modern conception of the Bible is a distinct 
and definite gain to the world ; and I propose to show you 
why I think so in two or three simple particulars. 

In the first place, he who holds this modern conception 
of the book is relieved from the burden that the intellect 
and the conscience of the enlightened modern world is find- 
ing too heavy to bear. We are no longer under obligations 
to defend that which is intellectually indefensible. We are 
no longer under obligation to apologize for that which 
certainly needs apology, if the rational intellect of the w r orld 
is to be trusted. 

Let me point out just what I mean in one or two directions. 
He who holds to the infallibility of the Bible and holds his 
conception of religion in that kind of framework is perpetu- 
ally challenged in this direction or that. If he goes to a 
man and says, " I want you to accept my religion, to become 
religious according to my ideas," the man to whom he speaks 
will be certain to say, if he be one who has doubted the 
infallibility of the Bible, " Must I believe the Biblical account 
of the creation of the world, which has been demonstrated 
to be false ? " What answer can the old type of Bible apolo- 
gist make to a challenge of this sort ? No answer, except to 
say: "You must forego the use of your intellect; you must 
give up the result of modern knowledge ; you must shut your 
eyes, and accept that which the best knowledge of the world 
declares to be untrue. You must do this, or you cannot be a 
lover and follower of God. You cannot be, in the highest 
and truest sense of the word, 'religious/" In other words, 
the man occupying the old traditional stand-point must forego 



178 Beliefs about the Bible. 

intellect, knowledge, and brain ; distrust them ; leave them 
one side, wondering why God ever gave them to man. That 
is only one illustration. 

Again, the doubter who would be religious, and who would 
also like to keep his brains, if he may, beginning with the 
first chapter of Genesis, will run all the way through, and 
will say: "What about the incredible story of the exodus of 
the Israelites from Egypt, intellectually incredible, morally 
indefensible? What about the conquest of Canaan; the 
shaking down of city walls at the sound of a ram's horn 
blown by the people ; the staying of the sun in the heavens 
until the end of a battle can be reached? What about 
human sacrifice ? What about the cruelty and immorality 
of a man like David, still said to be a man after God's own 
heart ? What about the genealogies of the New Testament ? 
What about its stupendous miracles that no one can explain ? 
What about the prophecies of the immediate coming of the 
kingdom from the Master's own lips, and as yet unfulfilled ? " 
I speak of these things to indicate the kind of intellectual 
and moral burden, the load, that rests upon a man who 
attaches his religion to the old conception of the Bible, who 
must defend all these things ; for they cannot be defended 
in the court of reason. He must either do this, or he must 
forego the use of his intellect, shut his eyes, and accept 
whatever is given. He must torture and twist texts out of 
their natural meaning, until there is wrought into the very 
fibre of his intellectual and moral nature the warp and woof 
of uncertainty, of deception, of unreality, and he questions 
whether words in their connections anywhere mean really 
what they say, getting into a state of mind like that of the 
clergyman who said to me the other day, " If my people 
understood what I say as I understand it, they would not 
listen to me for a week." I think it is a grand gain to be 



Present Use and Worth, 179 

able to throw off this burden, which neither the past nor the 
present has been able to bear, and to accept that which is 
true because it is true, feeling under no obligation to shut 
one's eyes or to stop one's thinking. 

Akin to this is another point, in some respects sufficiently 
important to make it worthy of separate mention. The 
world is set intellectually free by this modern conception 
of the Bible. He who holds the old ideas may claim to be 
intellectually free; but it is only the claim of a man who, 
shut within certain definite but very narrow limits, proclaims 
that he is perfectly free, because he does not choose to step 
outside of those limits. But, if the time ever comes when 
he wishes to step outside, then the bondage becomes irksome 
and unbearable. I remember my own experience, when I 
was studying theology in the seminary. I was told to study 
with perfect freedom, to make excursions through the uni- 
verse wherever I would, through science, philosophy, criti- 
cism, history ; but I knew all the while that there was a law, 
unuttered, which made it perfectly certain that if, after my 
excursions, I did not come back and settle down within these 
definite narrow limits, I was banned, excluded from the 
fellowship of those with whom I had been friends, whom I 
had learned to love, and who, as I believed, and as I was 
taught to believe, possessed the final and ultimate truth of 
God. I say it is a grand gain to set the human intellect free 
in this regard. 

According to the old ideas, when Copernicus began to 
study the nature of this universe, he was trespassing on 
dangerous ground ; for the minute that he found out that it 
did not accord with the Biblical story, that moment he was 
infidel and outcast. His system of demonstrated truth was 
opposed by all those who claimed officially to represent God 
on earth. When Magellan, starting on his voyage of dis- 



l8o Beliefs about the Bible, 

covery around the world, declared that he believed the earth 
was round, because he noticed that its shadow cast on the 
face of the moon during an eclipse had a circular outline, he 
was taking his stand on the reality of the universe that God 
had made ; but he was a rebel against God's church, God's 
book, God's infallible, revealed truth, according to all the 
standards of the time. He was not free, except by making 
himself outcast and infidel. And so, when Darwin, tracing 
through long years the problem as to the origin and nature 
of man, comes to the conclusion that the Eden story is not 
true, what must he do ? He must either assert the liberty of 
thought, and dare to look God's universe in the face, and 
ask it questions, and listen to receive its answer, or he must 
shut his eyes to what he knew was the truth, and bend his 
intellectual hands and feet to the wearing of spiritual chains. 

"There is no freedom, there can be no freedom, of intellect in 
the face of a system that claims to be absolutely infallible, 
unquestionably true. 

/It is, then, a grand gain to set the mind of the world free. 
For note you this : if the teaching of this claimed infallible 
system be true, then God's universe must be in accord with 
it ; and ultimate search, deepest investigation, can only con- 
firm it. Why, then, any need of the claimed infallibility? 
Here, then, is another distinct and definite and grand gain. 
There is one more that I must mention, which is even 
more magnificent, if possible, than either of these, because it 
touches the heart, the life, the hope, of man. 

Let us look for a moment at the outlook over this world, 
this changing scene of human history. One who occupies 
the old stand-point, what must he believe ? He must believe 
that the silent God sat in the heavens uttering never a word 
or a warning for thousands of years ; that at the last he 
selects one family, leaving all the rest of the world to wander 






Present Use and Worth, 181 

and perish. He selects one little family, and reveals to the 
founder of this family a hint of something to come in a far- 
off time. Then, ages go by. This little family grows \ but 
its light extends nowhere beyond its own limits. Age after 
age goes by, and the great outlying thousands and millions of 
the world are still perishing, and no word of warning is 
uttered, no hand reached out to lift them up or help. By 
and by there comes another who claims, or on whose behalf 
the claim is made, that he is the very God of the universe, 
himself come down to earth in the form of a man who lives 
and dies. His church is founded, and Christian history 
begins. Eighteen hundred years, and almost another cen- 
tury, have gone by, and not a third of the wide world yet has 
heard the message that God has spoken, or has felt the 
touch of his hand thrilling with love and help. On this 

(theory, it seems to me that God's dealing with this world, if 
he was in earnest, and if he meant to save it, is the most 
stupendous failure that human history has to record. But, 
on this other theory, what ? 

We are able to believe that this book is one among other 
books \ our religion one among other religions, — all of them 
equally natural, equally divine except in degree ; that, in 
every case, all these people were God's children, and that, in 
what little light they had, they were following after God, if 
haply they might find him ; that, with stammering lip or not 
fully uttered expression, they were giving vent to their 
thoughts, their hopes, their feelings, their fears, reaching out 
and up after the divine ; that God's light has flooded the 
earth from the beginning, shining into the brains and the 
hearts of men, just as fast and as far as those hearts and 
those brains were capable of receiving it; that all men 
thus are God's children, and that all of them have been 
guided and led, — never for a moment forsaken, never for a 



1 82 Beliefs about the Bible, 

moment forgotten ; each one in his own dialect uttering his 
hopes and aspirations, and reaching out and finding God. 
We are able to believe, on this theory, that Pope was right 
when he wrote his grand universal prayer : — 

"Father of all ! in every age, 
In every clime adored, 
By saint, by savage, and by sage, 
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord ! . . . 

" To Thee, whose temple is all space, 
Whose altar, earth, sea, skies, 
One chorus let all beings raise, 
All nature's incense rise ! " 

We are able to believe, for the first time in human history, 
that, when we utter the words, " Our Father, who art in 
heaven," they have a world-wide, universal, all-humanity- 
embracing meaning. They are a mockery on the other 
theory. For, if that be true, God has chosen, as his children, 
a few, no better than the rest, judged by human stand- 
ards, and has left the others, like sheep without a shepherd, 
to wander in the wilderness and be devoured by wild beasts 
at their will. These seem to me some grand reasons why we 
may count the modern change of theory concerning the 
Bible a great gain instead of a loss. 

II. But it is time for me to turn to my second question, 
and indicate to you three or four of the uses which the Bible 
may well have for us who have given up the old theories 
concerning it. In the first place, curiously enough, it seems 
to be imagined by those who have held to the old ideas that 
a religious truth ceases to be truth at all, unless it is backed 
up by an infallible inspiration. How do we find out what 
is truth ? We find it out by experience, do we not ? If it 
were infallibly revealed to men that corn is wholesome to 



Present Use and Worth. 183 

eat, would it add anything to the fact discovered by human 
experience ? Suppose it were recorded in a claimed infal- 
lible inspiration that corn was poison, experience would 
demonstrate that it was not. In either case, the revelation 
would be worth nothing concerning such a thing. Any 
revelation concerning the practical welfare of men would 
mean nothing to us, until we had lived it out by practical 
experience. We find out what is wholesome by testing 
it: we find out poison by testing that. We find out all 
the facts of human life in the same way. The methods by 
which conduct ought to be ordered in the relations of man 
with man, — social, political, commercial truths, — these are 
discovered by experience. Those who reject these truths 
ultimately go to the wall, crushed by them, because they are 
a part of the eternal ongoing of the resistless universe that 
has God's omnipotence at its heart. The truth, then, that 
the Bible contains remains true on any theory, and it will 
always be valuable as a part of the food and as part of the 
mental and moral stimulus and inspiration of man. For 

" Not all the critics can crush with their ban 
One word that is true to the nature of man." 

In the next place, for many centuries yet, I know not how 
long, the Bible is going to have a grand advantage over all 
the other books of the world by reason of the sacred memo- 
ries, the splendid associations that have clustered about it 
in the past, and will cluster about it for ages yet to come. 
What do I mean by this ? Do you not know, as you look 
over the past of your own lives, that many and many a time 
a truth has been uttered in your ears that on some other 
occasion, in the midst of other circumstances, would seem to 
you commonplace enough, a simple truth, abstract as a 
statement of a principle in algebra, perhaps, so far as it is 



184 Beliefs about the Bible. 

concerned, one that you may have heard before and may 
have heard many times since ; and yet, in your experience, 
it is set quite apart, surrounded by a halo of sacred light, 
having a meaning that it could not have had but for the fact 
that it is linked in your memory with some of the sacred 
associations of the past, with some epoch hour of your life? 
It was the word, perhaps, that mother spoke to you when 
you were a little boy at her knee ; the word that father 
uttered when you left home for the last time ; the word that 
some brother or sister may have spoken on their sick-bed, 
just before they faded away into the silence, — some word that 
comes to you with a power beyond itself, linked with mem- 
ory, with experience, and that has for you all the added 
weight of this sacred association. Now, the Bible, as no 
other book, has this hold in our sympathies and on our 
hearts. The Bible to most of us, whatever our creed may 
be, is bound up with the memories of childhood and mother 
and home. Some words from the Bible are connected with 
them, or with that hour which we do not remember, but of 
which we have been told, when we were consecrated by the 
noble and well-intended aspirations of our parents. Some 
words from the Bible are linked with the marriage service, 
that has changed for better or worse the whole after years 
of our life. Some words from the Bible are linked with 
those last sad funeral hours in which we have laid away 
those that we learned for so many years to love. The Bible 
is bound up as is no other book with the sacred and tender 
associations of our past. 

Then, again, on a larger than a merely personal scale, what 
other book is there that is so woven into that province of the 
world's civilization to which we belong? We cannot read 
of any of the great epochs of English achievement, of Amer- 
ican advancement, without seeing that some words from the 



Present Use and Worth. 185 

Eible played their part in the victory or the defeat. No one 
can read of Cromwell, of the Puritans, of the development 
of liberty in England, without seeing that the Bible was 
there, some of its grand words being the mainspring and 
inspiration of some of the noblest of all those movements. 

Then, the Bible is associated with much of the grandest 
art of the world, with its music, with all that is noblest and 
finest in our civilization. Whatever theory we hold of it, 
that makes no difference. These are the facts. It is pos- 
sible, in a sense in which it is true and can be true of no 
other book, that this is the book of Christendom ; and it 
will always occupy a unique position and have a unique 
and grand influence, — all the grander influence because we 
will be able to sift out the gold, weaving it into beautiful 
ornaments and implements of noble use, leaving the debris 
and the worthless material to find its own place. 

There is another point that seems to me of a good deal 
of importance. You will notice, as I conduct these services 
from Sunday to Sunday, that there are large parts of the 
Bible that I do not read. I select chapters or parts of 
chapters from both the Old Testament and the New, but I 
cannot read it indiscriminately. Large parts of it I pass by. 
For what reason? Simply because I wish to be perfectly- 
frank and open as to what I believe, and because I do not 
choose to spend half my morning, after I have read a 
passage, in telling you that I do not believe it literally, and 
in explaining to you in what sense I do take it. The time 
will come, when we have passed through this transition hour, 
when the results of the criticism of the Bible have been 
settled, when the thoughts of men have found their place, — 
the time will come, I say, when I shall be able to read any 
part of this Bible from the pulpit, and not be misunderstood. 
I shall not be understood to believe a miracle, because I read 



1 86 Beliefs about the Bible. 

the account of it. I shall not be understood to accept as 
history an Old Testament legend, because I read it as a 
lesson. I can read from any other part of the literature of 
the world, and people understand me. I can draw out the 
lessons, beautiful and rich with human associations, from 
any legendary lore of the world, outside of the Bible, and 
never be misunderstood. The time will come when I can 
use the Bible in the same way ; and, when I can, I shall find, 
and you will find, that there is no book in the world so rich 
in human instruction as is this book. Legend, allegory, 
miracle, parable, — all wrought and woven through and through 
with the texture and color of human experience, — I shall be 
able to use them with a force that pertains to no abstract 
truth. It requires a high order of intellect to deal with 
abstract truth, pure and colorless. To illustrate in a concrete 
way what I mean : I remember that Mr. Collyer was one 
day telling me that he repeated a certain sermon to his 
people ; and, as he was coming out, one of them said, " I 
remember perfectly well that you have preached that sermon 
before." Mr. Collyer replied, "I have no doubt of it; but, 
if I had only happened to think to leave out the story of the 
little dog, you never would have remembered it in the world." 
This carries the principle that illustration or a story, some- 
thing concrete, something that touches human life, something 
that has the flavor of human experience about it, fixes itself 
in the memory. It is carried where abstract truth is lost and 
forgotten. 

By and by, the time will come when I shall be able to read 
you the story of the cruse of oil that was an inexhaustible 
fountain from which the widow could pour and pour without 
refilling it, and I shall be able out of that to deduce grand 
lessons that are ideally true, whatever may be said concern- 
ing the outer shell that encloses them. The miracle of turn- 



Present Use and Worth, 187 

ing the water into wine at Cana of Galilee, — do you not see 
how at the heart of it there is a great universal human truth? 
Are there not experiences in the lives of us all, when the 
presence of some superior man or woman, the word of some 
superior wisdom, touches the commonplace of our lives, and 
transmutes them into gold? The story of the transfigura- 
tion, — do we not all climb up on heights of mountain out- 
look where our faces are transfigured, where they shine with 
a light they never knew before, and where we enter into 
communion, as did the disciples with Moses and Elias, with 
the great, the heroic of all the past, and where we enter into 
a new range of experience, something higher than we should 
be able to maintain as the ordinary level of life? These just 
as hints of what a storehouse of wealth for human lessons 
this old Bible will be, when we are able to read it with 
untrammelled intellect, and without stopping to think of 
critical questions of truth and untruth. 

One thing more. The Bible must forever have one use 
and meaning that is true concerning it in a sense that is true 
of no other book. As far as my acquaintance with sacred 
literature extends, the Bible contains the most complete and 
finished religious biography in the world. That is, it traces, 
from the very earliest forms of the religious life, the origin, 
the birth, the growth, the development, the mistakes, the 
faults, the failures, the decline and fall of a great race relig- 
ion. What is the use of that ? 

Let me illustrate a moment, to make it clear to you. A 
physician, if he wishes to know how to treat a well man to 
keep him well, or a sick man in order to cure his disease, 
must know, as far as possible, all that pertains to the birth, 
the growth, the disease, the health, the decay, and the death 
of a man ; and so he starts with the little primal germ, and 
traces the physical life of man all the way through, and 



1 88 Beliefs about the Bible. 

this becomes to him a perpetual lesson, a storehouse of 
knowledge, a guide in the practical experience of his every- 
day life. We read the biography of a man ; and, if we are 
wise, we extract from it lessons as to how to live. If the 
man has been faulty, if he has made mistakes, if he has 
wandered this way or that, all the better for us, as far 
as the instructiveness of that biography is concerned. If 
we are dealing with a chart that shows us the navigation 
of a dangerous 'coast, we do not want simply to know that 
here is an open channel : we want signals to indicate the 
places where wrecks have gone down. And so again, in 
regard to the religious books and biographies of the world, 
we need to know the mistakes, the faults, the wanderings, 
all that pertains to the religious experience of the race. We 
want to know it as a part of our text-book. As one more 
illustration, more commensurate with the theme, let me 
ask, What is the use to-day of reading Gibbon, the decline 
and fall of a great empire ? Of supplementing that with all 
that can be known of the early times of Rome, of the time 
when it was a dominant force on the earth? Why, the 
history of that race is a perpetual storehouse of instruction 
for statesmen, for politicians, for all those who are interested 
for the social and political welfare of man. So, if you can 
give us a complete text-book that shall teach us concerning 
the origin of a great scheme of religious thought concern- 
ing God and man, you have given us a book that at all times 
shall act as warning, as instruction, as inspiration, as light, 
as guidance. And so the Bible, being the completest biogra- 
phy of the religious life of a race, must always, in the thought 
of any intelligent and serious man, occupy a unique and 
wonderful position, and maintain its influence as light and 
guidance for centuries. 

Is there to be a loss of reverence and real religiousness in 



Present Use and Worth, 189 

the world springing out of and flowing from this change ? I 
cannot believe it. It used to be supposed, and it was taught 
for ages, that it was impossible to train and maintain a spirit 
of loyalty on the part of a people, unless there was a visible 
symbol of that loyalty in king and sceptre and throne. And 
thousands of well-meaning men have fought for monarchy, 
because they believed that these outward and visible symbols 
were necessary to keep alive the spirit of loyalty and devo- 
tion. But have we not proved that that fear was vain ? Has 
there ever been in the history of the world a grander devel- 
opment of loyalty, a more wide-spread devotion to it, a more 
unselfish outpouring of life than we have shown without 
either sceptre or throne or king ? Have we not learned, as 
the result of human experience, that all the happiness of 
man, his welfare, his prosperity, are bound up with law-keep- 
ing and with order? We recognize all the great principles 
that underlie these things. And, though it be only an ideal, 
having no outward embodiment unless it be in a flag, still we 
are ready to pay to it our utmost devotion of heart and life. 
And so I believe concerning this Bible. Whatever theory 
goes up or down, taken as a fact, religion is a part of the 
experience of the world, it is the tidal wave which lifts the 
aspiring heart of man toward the stars. 

It is the result of human experience. And this demon- 
strates its utility, its power, its grasp on the heart and the 
brain of the world ; and, on the basis of this, we may expect 
it will forever abide. 

The Bible, then, may be left to hold its own place. The 
religiousness, the reverence, the loyalty, the love, the aspira- 
tion of man will not only remain, but will go on, and grow 
and broaden till they become not only parts, but the very 
heart and soul, of all that is noble in human civilization. 



THE ETERNAL BIBLE. 



Whatever theory we may hold concerning the universe 
of which we are a part and in which we live, it is still true 
that, when we analyze the word to learn its most abstract and 
general definition, we find that human life consists of a series 
of actions and reactions between the individual and his 
environment. You will find, if you will take the trouble to 
think it out more particularly than I have time to illustrate 
it this morning, that, in whatever direction you start, whether 
you deal with man in his social relations, as a business man, 
as an artist, or what not, that this abstract statement which 
I have made covers the entire truth. Life consists in a 
series of actions and reactions between man and the uni- 
verse. And a successful life, as distinguished from any 
other kind, depends entirely upon the question whether man 
perceives the right relations in which he ought to stand to 
these forces and powers all around him and with which he 
deals. The commercial man, for example, if he rightly 
apprehends the problem given him to solve, and is capable 
of dealing with it, will be a successful merchant. The law- 
yer, if he rightly apprehends the points of the case given him 
to manage, and has intelligence and force to mould and 
shape his case in accordance with what he perceives, will 
succeed. And so in any other department of human life. 
And this right relation, or the perception of this right rela- 
tion, in which man stands, or ought to stand, to the forms 



The Eternal Bible. 191 

and forces of the universe about him, is what we mean by 
the word " truth." If you will analyze it carefully, you will 
find that truth has just this meaning and no other. A truth 
of thought is simply my way of stating the fact that the 
external reality with which I am dealing corresponds to the 
thought that I have already in my brain. If, for example, 
I take a flower in my hand, it impresses me as possessing 
a certain shape, a certain color, a certain fragrance. If my 
perception is correct, — that is, if I see the real relation 
between that flower and my brain, — I see the truth concern- 
ing it. The truth, then, in any direction, so far as man's 
thought is concerned, is only the establishment of perfect 
correspondence between the thought and the thing. A prac- 
tical truth, as apart from this abstract truth, is simply a per- 
ception and establishment of right relations between man's 
active faculties and the external world with which he deals. 
Now, how does man discover this truth ? Is there more 
than one way ? I believe that truth always, everywhere, in 
all cases, has been discovered, is being discovered to-day, 
and must be discovered forever, through the process of 
human experience ; for truth pertains to the nature of 
things. It is a part of our life, of the relationship in which 
we stand to the forms and forces of the universe about us. 
To talk of truth away off somewhere in the depths of the 
universe, that does not touch us, that does not come into 
relation with us in any way, that has nothing to do practi- 
cally with our life or thinking, is to talk of nothing. There 
is no truth for man apart from this truth of perception and 
practical relationship in which he stands to the life of things 
around him. Men talk of truth as if it were a sort of entity 
stored up somewhere outside of the world, that could be 
injected into it from without, as if it were something outside 
of the nature of things that could be given to men, as 



192 Beliefs about the Bible. 

though it were a commodity placed in their hands, as though 
it were a light that could be shed abroad over the earth from 
outside, as though it were a series of propositions that 
could be put into men's brains and hearts from some exter- 
nal source. 

If I have made you apprehend clearly the very abstract 
thought with which I began, that truth is simply a part of 
the nature of things, that "t consists essentially in the 
relation in which we stand to the forms and forces that 
are around us, you will see the absurdity of supposing that 
either God or man could bring truth from the outside, and 
put it into the universe or into human life. The only way by 
which men ever did apprehend or ever can apprehend truth 
is as the result of their own experience in dealing with these 
forms and forces with which we come into relation day by 
day, year after year, and age after age. 

Truth, then, always and everywhere, is the result of 
human experience. There is no other method by which we 
can possibly come into possession of it. The amount of 
truth which any race, any people, will possess at any given 
stage of their experience or progress, will depend, of course, 
upon the character of that people, upon their intelligence, 
and upon the range of their experience. It is also true, in 
every race and in every period of the world's history, that 
there is some one man or a group of men or a few men 
scattered here and there, who possess a clearer insight, a 
keener perception, a broader power of generalization, than is 
possessed by the common mass of busy people engaged in 
the practical concerns of life. And these keener, more 
thoughtful men, those that have the clearer insight, what will 
they do? They wfil not be able to discover or formulate 
any truth that has not been experienced by the race to 
which they belong, but they will be able to see more clearly 



The Eternal Bible. 193 

that which others dimly feel. They will be able to interpret 
in language that which the mass of the people have partially 
apprehended, but to which they have never been able to 
give expression. Just as you say, when you are listening 
to a man, " He is giving expression to what I have been 
'""feeling after, and half-perceived, for years, but have never 
been able to put into words " ; so precisely these seers, these 
prophets, these leading men of the world, are able to 
condense, to crystallize, so to speak, to give outline and 
form and expression to that which the mass of their fellow- 
men have experienced and dimly felt. And because this 
truth that the seers of the world have perceived and 
expressed seems to the mass of the people so wonderful, 
so much above what they themselves feel capable of saying 
or clearly apprehending or expressing, we find — and this is 
true all over the world, in every clime, among every people 
— that, when these truths of human experience have thus 
been formulated and expressed, the mass of the people have 
looked upon them with so much wonder and reverence that 
they have come to believe that they are a divine revelation, 
something let down from above, something coming out of 
the sky. They have not been able to understand that such 
marvellous truths concerning the universe and human life, 
such wonderful speculations concerning God and the future, 
could possibly have sprung out of the common experience of 
common men. So they have told themselves stories and 
invented fairy tales of how these seers and prophets have 
had special ways of access to and intercourse with teachers 
higher than human. In this way have grown up stories of 
divine and supernatural revelations of systems of truth. 
In each case, this supposed divine and supernatural system 
has only been the fragment of truth which this particular 
people, up to this particular point in the line of its develop- 



194 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ment, has experienced or been able to put into formal 
expression. 

Two or three results which have been repeated over and 
over again in the history of the world now come into view. 
When any particular people has made up its mind that it has 
received from the gods, or their god, a special, supernatural 
revelation of truth, then what ? Two results in almost every 
case have followed, — results perfectly natural and springing 
out of the circumstances in which they found themselves 
placed. They have received, they think, a divine, super- 
natural revelation of truth. The next step is that they per- 
suade themselves that they have all the truth there is, — all 
the truth, at any rate, that men need or ever will need ; and 
so they close their book, their Bible, or revelation, and say, 
Here, we have a sure and complete compendium of divine 
truth concerning the origin of this universe, of nature, of 
God, his purposes toward man, and all that pertains to the 
future of human destiny. The Mohammedan caliph is re- 
ported to have said concerning the Alexandrian Library : " If 
these books agree with the Koran, we do not need them ; if 
not, they are false. So, in any case, let them be destroyed. ,, 

Along with this there always comes a certain spiritual 
pride, a certain religious self-conceit j and the people fancy 
that they must be special favorites of heaven, — and why 
not ? If God has singled me out from all the thousands 
and millions of the world, if he has come in person to me, 
or sent a special messenger to me to tell me his secret, why 
should I not feel lifted up above the level of the ordinary 
run of my fellow-men ? If, instead of its being one person, 
it is a race, precisely the same effect will follow ; and so we 
do find, as a matter of history, that one race after another, 
in the past, has fancied that it has received this divine reve- 
lation, that it possesses a complete system of eternal truth j 



The Eternal Bible, 195 

and, as the next step, it fancies that it is the favorite of God, 
a chosen people, set apart, selected out of all the nations, 
and made the depositary of the divine truth. 

And then what ? Another natural step follows upon the 
heels of this. One of two things this people will do in such 
circumstances. They will either build a Chinese wall of 
exclusiveness around themselves, and look over the rest 
of the world and down upon it with scorn and contempt, 
neglect it, fold their arms in a sort of conceited content, and 
leave it to go its own way to destruction, regarding everybody 
but their own people as outside barbarians, while they live in 
the centre of the world and under the very dome of heaven; 
or else they will regard themselves as a missionary people, 
to whom this truth has been committed and upon whom has 
been imposed the duty of bringing all the rest of the world, 
either by persuasion or force, into subjugation to their ideas. 
We find that different religions have illustrated both types. 
Take the Chinese, for example. They occupy the Central 
Flowery Kingdom, and all the rest of the world are outside 
barbarians. They never think of sending out missionaries. 
It seems to them a matter of slight importance whether the 
rest possess the truth or not, or what their destiny in the 
future may be. 

On the other hand, take the Buddhists, the Christians, 
the Mohammedans. They have considered themselves as 
divinely commissioned to proselyte all the rest of the world. 
They have sent out missionaries to compel them to come in. 
If they would not come in as the result of persuasion, they 
felt they must force them ; as the Mohammedans wrote their 
short creed — Allah is Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet 
— on the point of the sword ; thus, if in no other way, thrust- 
ing it down the throat or into the hearts of their enemies. 

Thus, each people has taken its fragment of truth, and 



196 Beliefs about the Bible, 

supposed it to be the divine and complete system of religion. 
It has written its Bible, and supposed that here was the 
closed canon of the revelation of God, that they and they 
alone were the depositaries of eternal truth. This belief 
could very easily be held by any nation, as long as it was 
isolated, as long as the nations knew very little of each 
other, as long as there was no possibility of frequent com- 
munication all-over the world. It is only within fifty years, 
perhaps, that some of these great systems of religion have 
been opened up to the thought and life of the modern world. 
As long as each people stayed at home and knew very little 
about its neighbors, it could very comfortably maintain its 
self-conceit, and suppose that it was the only civilized people, 
the only one that had any respectable religious ideas, the 
only one that had any noble principles of ethics, the only 
one that had ever received any light from heaven or under- 
stood the mysteries of God. But a change must come to 
any state like this. How does it come ? As I have indi- 
cated. The one source of truth is experience, and the new 
movement comes as the result of deepened, broadened, 
enlarged human experience. These nations living quietly 
by themselves, so exclusive in their selfish content, have been 
compelled to become acquainted with each other. 

War has done something toward this larger civilization. 
For, when nations fight with each other and come into the 
rough shock of conflict, they learn the stuff of which this 
other people is made ; and there comes to them a larger 
sympathy of humanity, a larger feeling of the common ele- 
ments of greatness, a larger appreciation of the fact that 
they are not the only people in the world, but that there are 
others, wise and mighty and strong as they. 

Commerce has done more even than war ; for it has cov- 
ered all the seas with ships, and men have gone to and fro, 



The Eternal Bible. 197 

discovering the common brotherhood of humanity, finding 
similar religious and intellectual ideas, similar ethical prin- 
ciples. They have brought home the story; and so these 
ideas have been scattered from one nation to another, thus 
becoming the common property of civilization. 

Discovery and scientific investigation have done something, 
for they have sent their explorers all over the world to study 
the history of these alien civilizations, their literature, their 
religious and moral ideas ; and, thus, they have given us a 
grander and broader conception of men, nature, and life. 
So these various influences have been at work, and men 
have taken a higher position as the result of the growing 
experience of the world and of human life ; and this growing 
experience has written a new chapter in the perception of . 
truth, that the wise and thoughtful of all the world may read. 

What has been the result ? This old belief, on the part of 
these separated nationalities and religions, that they had all 
the truth, and that they were the only ones that had, is 
passing away. It has become impossible for an intelligent 
man any longer to believe it. Two grand objections face us, 
— and either one of them is strong enough to overthrow com- 
pletely this theory, — an intellectual objection and a moral 
objection. 

The intellectual objection I have already hinted and partly 
outlined. What have men learned, what have we Chris- 
tians learned concerning some of the other religions of the 
world ? We have learned that our experience has not been 
unique, but that it has been the universal experience of the 
world. We have learned also that our system of truth is 
only a fragment of the universal truth. We have learned 
that other people, other nations, have passed through similar 
experiences, and consequently have arrived at similar con- 
clusions ; that they have discovered similar truths, similar 



198 Beliefs about the Bible. 

ideas concerning the universe, God, and man, similar prin- 
ciples of morals, or ideas of right and wrong. We have 
learned that they have Bibles of their own, and that they 
think they came by divine revelation, as we have thought 
ours did ; that they have set themselves up as the exclusive 
possessors of divine truth, just as we have ; that they have 
had the same kind of conceit that we have had ; that they 
have supposed they were favorites of God, as we have sup- 
posed we were4 and that they have started out to convert the 
world, just as we have, and for precisely the same reasons. 
/^Furthermore, we have found that they have just as much 
\ reason for holding these opinions as we have had, no more 
\ and no less. 

What is the next step ? We are forced to the conclusion 
that one of two things is true. Either there were half a 
dozen divine revelations and half a dozen infallible Bibles, — 
in which case, we wonder why it would not have been just as 
well to give one universal, complete one in the first place ; 
or to the conviction that there is not any universal religion in 
existence or any universal and infallible truth or any infalli- 
ble Bible, but that we all have passed through similar stages, 
and by similar steps of human experience have arrived at 
similar conclusions. The result is irresistible that the truth 
we have reached has come to us — no less from God than on 
the other theory — through the process and by the method of 
our human experience in living out our life and dealing with 
these great principles and forces of the universe that touch 
us on every hand. 

The moral objection is quite as strong as the intellectual 
one. As men grow wiser, as they grow better, as they have 
a larger conception of human brotherhood, broader ideas of 
justice, a deeper thought of truth, a wider sympathy and 
more care for human welfare, it ceases to be possible for 



The Eternal Bible. 199 

them to believe that the infinite God of this universe cares 
any more about one part of his children than he does about 
the rest. It ceases to be possible for man with a grandly- 
developed and sympathetic moral nature to feel that the God 
of the whole earth is capable of being partial, of having his 
pets, of selecting either individuals or nations and giving 
them his special care, and leaving all the rest to wander in 
darkness, or fall into pits of destruction. The highest and 
noblest moral natures of the world would find it impossible 
to worship, or even to respect, a God who was capable of 
a partiality like that. It ceases then to be morally possible 
for men to hold this old exclusive, partial, selfish conception 
of God, of religion, of the Bible, of divine and infallible 
truth. 

What then ? What is the next step to which we are 
forced ? This, plain and inevitable : a recognition of the 
fact that these separate and distinct religions are only parts 
of the universal religion yet to come ; that these separate 
and closed Biblical canons are only chapters in the universal 
and eternal Bible, as yet only partially written. 

I want now to note two main characteristics of this eternal 
Bible. 

In the first place, it must cover and include all truth that 
touches the concerns of life and the welfare of man. In the 
second place, it must be forever being written and never 
done. These are the two tests by which you may judge the 
universal and eternal Bible of God. 

Religion in its conception as it has hitherto prevailed in 
the world has been narrow. It has concerned itself only 
with a little fragment of human life. We talk about religion 
and business, religion and politics, religion and science, relig- 
ion and art, religion and morality. The coming grander and 
truer conception of religion will, of necessity, sweep all 



200 Beliefs about the Bible. 

these particulars under its one grand generalization. A 
man must be religious in business, religious in politics, relig- 
ious in science, religious in art, religious in everything. It 
must be the quality that permeates all life, the atmosphere 
that men breathe everywhere. Religion is the secret of the 
highest, truest life of man. Religion is the expression we 
give to the relation in which we stand to the universe, — that 
is, to God. It is our dealing with him. It is our dealing 
with the totality of life. No man can be in the broadest and 
truest and deepest sense of the word religious, except as 
he is a complete man, in right relations to all the forms and 
forces of the universe about him. And, if he is a complete 
and true man, he gives utterance to the truest and deepest 
conception of the religious life; for that is what religion 
means. 

Religion, then, must deal with the physical nature of man. 
And here is one particular in which the Old Testament is 
far ahead of the New. Moses places sanitary laws side by 
side with the command to worship one God and no more, 
making one of equal importance with the other. The New 
Testament throws contempt upon this world, and speaks 
slightingly of the body, "this vile body/' "Bodily exercise 
profiteth little," etc. It is sprinkled all over with passages 
expressing contempt for this world, the material side of 
things ; and yet there never was a sane or true religion except 
as it based itself on a sound and healthy physical life. We 
must begin with our religion right here. Cleanliness is not 
next to godliness merely. It is a part of godliness ; and so 
is every other sanitary regulation that touches the welfare 
and health of the physical man. 

This eternal Bible must go over the whole realm of truth. 
It must include all man's social relations, all political 
relations, all international relations, all science, all art. It 



The Eternal Bible, 20 r 

must include everything that touches the life and happiness 
of man. The eternal Bible, then, will cover and include all 
truth, so far as it is developed and wrought out as the result 
of the experience of the world. 

I said that its second characteristic was that it was always 
being written and never finished. This, you will see, springs 
naturally out of the principles thus far developed. Truth, 
as far as it appertains to the welfare of man, being the 
result of human experience, developed by it, presented as 
the result of it, must of course keep step with human 
experience, and can never transcend it, so that humanity 
writes a new sentence in its Bible with every new step of 
human experience, with every new and larger contact with 
the universe in which it lives. The boy has the truth which 
pertains to the boyish nature; but, as he grows up and 
becomes a young man, he comes into new experiences, which 
enlarge and broaden his ideas. He has new and wider 
conceptions of life, that enable him to live the true life of a 
young man. The middle-aged man and the old man come 
into new experiences as they advance ; and, thus, truth keeps 
step with human life. 

This Bible, then, is not done. It never will be done, until 
the last thinking being is weary of thought, and fallen asleep. 

There is one other phase of my subject, carrying it on and 
rounding it out, that I wish to bring to your thought, and 
which may seem somewhat new to you, put in just the way 
in which I propose to state it. Is there any reason in the 
nature of things why we should forever look at God, the 
universe, the great truths of religion, through Hebrew eyes 
and none other ? Let us be glad and thankful for all the 
Hebrews saw. Let us rejoice for the depth and breadth 
of their religious experience, and take it as our light and 
guidance, as far as it extends ; but is there any reason why 



202 Beliefs about the Bible. 

Americans should not come into contact, first hand, with the 
divine, as well as Hebrews, Egyptians, Buddhists, and Mo- 
hammedans ? Is it not the same God above us ? Are not 
the same heavens over us as bright with stars as were those 
that shone over the Judean hills? Are there not now 
as fair flowers, as fresh grasses, as those from which Jesus 
drew his lessons of religion and life? Are not as noble 
hearts, as unselfish devotion manifested to-day, as high quali- 
ties of manhood and womanhood in society as in olden 
times ? Reversing and changing the purpose of those ques- 
tions of Shylock, may we not say instead : Hath not an 
American eyes ? Hath not an American a heart, brain, soul, 
religious faculties, moral perceptions, as well as a Jew or a 
Buddhist or a Mohammedan ? Do we not stand in as inti- 
mate and close relations with the father-heart of God in the 
nineteenth century as men stood five hundred, a thousand, 
two, three thousand years ago ? Has God moved farther 
off ? Are the heavens more distant ? Are we less wise, less 
capable of thinking, less capable of feeling than they were 
in the olden time ? 

I appeal to your consciousness, to your clearer thought, as 
to what are the ideals, the forces, and the methods that 
govern your own life to-day ? Are you not guided by the 
Bible of the ages instead of the Bible of the Hebrews and 
the Christians ? What are the doctrines, the ideas, the beliefs 
that are moulding and shaping your life to-day ? They are a 
part of the life of to-day and not those of two thousand or 
five thousand years ago. 

Where is our book of Genesis ? It is not in the Bible. 
The book of Genesis that we believe in and that we are 
guided by was written by Copernicus, by Galileo, by Newton, 
by Laplace, by Lyell, by Spencer, by Darwin. And, if we 
profess to believe in the old Genesis, we are perpetually re- 



The Eternal Bible. 203 

interpreting and retranslating its ideas, so that they shall 
echo Copernicus and these other men. Where is our book 
of the Law ? Do we really go to the Pentateuch to find out 
the principles by which we shall guide and govern our daily 
lives ? No. We go to those men and to a hundred others 
who have studied for us and laid down the laws of this actual 
universe of which we are a part. We go to men like Dr. 
Carpenter, of London, to find out how this marvellous body 
of ours is made. Servetus and Harvey wrote some sentences 
in this wondrous book of the Law. Ferrier in his studies 
of the brain, Bain and his co-workers and compeers in out- 
lining the marvellous nature and functions of our nervous 
system, — these men who have studied the real laws of the 
universe and human life, and have written them for us, they, 
not the Pentateuch, are the real book of the Law by which 
the modern world is being guided, whatever men may say or 
profess about it. Where are our divine histories, those that 
really move and control the world ? They are not the Kings, 
Samuel, Judges, and the Chronicles of the Old Testament. 
They are the histories of Greece, of Rome, of the Middle 
Ages, of Germany, of the rise and progress of modern civ- 
ilization, Green's history of the English people, Bancroft's 
history of America, all those that have given us the sources 
of that stream of national life of which we are a part. 
These are the histories that are moving the modern world. 

Who are our heroes ? Are they any longer Samuel, Jeph- 
thah, Gideon, and David, and the grand names of the old 
book that are a part of our childhood thought ? No : they 
are the men that have fought for truth and for freedom and 
for human advancement. Our heroes are Winkelried, the 
barons that met King John at Runnymede, Cromwell of the 
Commonwealth, that grand group allied to Washington that 
figured in our Revolution, other men like Lincoln and Gar- 



204 Beliefs about the Bible. 

rison, men that have stood for truth and human right. 
These are the heroes that shine like stars in our moral and 
intellectual firmament, that give us the light by which we are 
guided and the inspiration for our every-day life. 

Where are our ideal women? Are they Miriam and 
Deborah and Ruth and Esther and Mary and Dorcas, those 
that are simply names to us in the olden book ? Are they 
not rather Mary Carpenter and Florence Nightingale and 
Frances Power Cobbe and Marian Evans of England, 
Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Thompson, Mary A. Livermore, 
and a hundred others I might name, that are making and 
shaping the life of these modern times ? If women like these 
had lived in the ancient days, they would have towered so 
much above the noblest of them all that either they would 
have been persecuted and put to death as ahead of their time, 
or idealized and worshipped as divine. 

Who are the prophets arid seers that lead and inspire 
us now ? They will still continue to be in part those who 
have written the noble, burning words that have led on the 
world for so many centuries ; but added to these are all the 
great religious leaders, — Zoroaster, Gautama, Confucius, 
Socrates, — the great men of more recent times, — Savon- 
arola, Wickliff, Luther, Wesley, Swedenborg, Channing, 
Theodore Parker, these great seers, utterers of divine 
truth, those that have lifted up and led on the life of the 
world. 

And what are really the Gospels that fire us, that come to 
us whispering their good news ? They are in part those that 
have been written in the days of old. They include the 
Gospels of our New Testament, the light and life that came 
through Jesus of Nazareth ; but they include also those 
other flashes of light that have come out of the inner heav- 
ens of human thought and life, and are streaming out of 



The Eternal Bible. 205 

them still. They are to be found very largely in the ranks 
of those men that have been thought to be opposed to 
gospel and to God, in the ranks of men doing the work of 
science. These are bringing to us the good news that 
man is mighty, that there are secret forces and powers in 
this universe that man can discover, that he can harness as 
his servants and compel to do his work. They are discov- 
ering that man may control and mould all the forces of 
the universe around him, and lift himself up from drudgery 
and slavery to that nature that has dominated him so long. 

Where are the apocalypses, those that unfold the future and 
teach us what it is that is coming ? They are not like that 
wonderful phantasmagorical dream of John that closes the 
New Testament. They are again these same men of science ; 
for, as Patrick Henry said, there is no w r ay of foretelling the 
future except by the past. And it is the study of this past, 
the study of the principles that underlie and control the 
development of civilization up to this hour, that are indicating 
the possibilities of future growth and progress. And, look- 
ing along the line of these up the ages, by a faith that is not 
credulity, a faith forever springing out of human experience, 
a faith based in the nature of things, we see man sceptred 
and crowned controlling the world, with its forces at his feet, 
its mightiest powers his ministers, himself master henceforth 
of the world and of his destiny. 

These, then, I say, are the real chapters of the eternal 
Eible that are being written age after age as the result of 
human discovery and experience, — a Bible not yet complete, 
a Bible in which each new truth is a sentence, and each new 
grand discovery a chapter or a book, and that shall go on 
being written by the finger of God in human life forever. 
And, as it progresses, it shall cease to be a book whose every 
page is blood-spattered, as were the Old Testament books of 



206 Beliefs about the Bible. 

the past. No longer shall its pages be defaced with so 
copious a rain of human tears. It shall not be so largely 
made up of groans at the world's injustice or with human 
cries for help. For the time shall come, it is coming pro- 
gressively, when this truth of God shall be more and more 
written in the hearts and lives of men, and when it shall be 
no longer necessary to say to one another, know thou the 
Lord, know thou the truth, know thou the perfect relig- 
ious life ; for all shall know and live in the harmony of this 
truth and life the wide world over forevermore. 








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